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>>As far as I understood it, the commercially available ventilators are too complicated to ramp up production quickly. Very true, but USA, China, EU, Russia,
by onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>As far as I understood it, the commercially available ventilators are too complicated to ramp up production quickly.
Very true, but USA, China, EU, Russia, India etc have their militaries ready to go with Plan A, B and C, they don't order bullets once invaded.
We all knew that pandemics are part of life, so we should have had warehouses full of this stuff. USA is spending about $700 BILLION a year in military matters and untold trillions in Afghanistan and Iraq. So, at least USA does not need an open source one, we can afford to pay whatever price they sell it for. They neglected this and of course now it's too late. 100K ventilators at, say,$25K each = $2,500,000,000 unless I made a mistake. What's $2.5 Billion to USA?
- bayesian_horse 7y ago$2.5 Billion is a lot to the US, especially if it's taxpayer money for a public health issue. But actually pretty much all countries have stumbled into the same problem. A respiratory pandemic of this magnitude wasn't anticipated by anyone, for reasons that should be investigated further. Now it's very easy to say there should have been a bigger stockpile, but a lot of the voters, especially in the GOP are quite sensitive to government spending, especially for healthcare. And it's important to remember that there are probably other things countries need stockpiles of, with a similar anticipated risk. For example dialysis machines for a kidney disease pandemic. These things add up quickly, and all you can do is make an educated guess of how far to anticipate any such threat.
- foobarian 7y ago> A respiratory pandemic of this magnitude wasn't anticipated by anyone, for reasons that should be investigated further. Right, we had close calls in the near past, but why did they not spread like this one?
- varjag 7y agoDue to combination of enormous containment effort and luck. And of course a crisis averted becomes a source of Internet jokes rather than a lesson in preparedness. But you can't be lucky all the time.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoI'd say the "near-misses" were a few orders of magnitude less severe. This virus is extremely uncommon in that it is both severe, highly transmissible and a completely new type of virus. I really don't think most people in developed countries would have agreed to spend a couple Billion Dollars to have reserves in the healthcare system, including ventilators, hospital beds and personnel, in order to prevent a problem a couple of magnitudes bigger than anticipated.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoActually it is not a lot, considering. But looks like prices are down, Pentagon bought 8000 of them for $84M. https://apnews.com/1fd6413c9615da74d44d971075ebf4ff https://apnews.com/1fd6413c9615da74d44d971075ebf4ff You'd stagger the purchases so not every possible thing is bought at once. Or offer 50% of cost to states if they commit to buy xxxx machines over y years. For scale: Hospitals got some $100 BILLION from Congress for CoronaVirus.
- coliveira 7y agoNo, $2.5Bi is not a lot of money to save thousands of lives. The US wastes untold billions of dollars with war equipment that will probably NEVER be used, on a yearly basis.
- bayesian_horse 7y agoAgain, politically, for this particular purpose, and on a risk that was considered extremely low, this kind of amount is a lot. And it wouldn't be enough to solve or avert the crisis.
- jacobsenscott 7y agoPlenty of people anticipated this given the many near misses we've had since the 1918 pandemic. But there's no money in preparing for pandemics.