My wife is a doctor (I am not). I've been following COVID closely and discussing with her/peers. I'm not an expert (but feel I have an above average understandi

My wife is a doctor (I am not). I've been following COVID closely and discussing with her/peers. I'm not an expert (but feel I have an above average understanding, thanks to my wife) > I see a lot of DIY posts that are probably not 100% the same thing but are they even close? I have yet to see (though I haven't looked extensively) a DIY ventilator that has the fine tune control many doctors are suggesting are required for COVID patients. My understanding is most of the DIY vents are comparable to emergency or transport vents. They'll keep a patient breathing for minutes/hours until they can be transferred to a proper ventilator. After a short period of time, you really need to transfer a patient to a proper ventilator to continue to support life. Two big challenges with COVID patients in particular: * They require ventilation for DAYS or even weeks. Over durations of that long, you really need precise control over a vent. A tech analogy is using floating point numbers for finance. Over a small number of transactions, a floating point number may be sufficient. Over time, though, the inaccuracies of floating point numbers will become apparent. * Many COVID patients needing ventilation also have Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). The simple explanation is their lungs are functioning so poorly that you can't simply stuff oxygen into them and hope it works. You need to be extremely particular with how you control breathing. * Bonus, related to point two, many doctors are reporting using pretty crazy ventilation settings as a baseline. They're basically overclocking a CPU/GPU by default then hoping they can keep overclocking as CPU/GPU load increases (not fully accurate, but it's an analogy).