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People are not put on ventilators for no reason. They are put because their oxygen level is so level that they will die if it deteriorates. People ended up on v

People are not put on ventilators for no reason. They are put because their oxygen level is so level that they will die if it deteriorates. People ended up on ventilators after they received maximum possible level of supplementary oxygen. This explanation sounds very implausible and simplistic. When a person has extremely low oxygen level and you are giving them maximum oxygen possible, what can you do? Ventilator or ECMO (which is probably even more dangerous).

war1025 6y ago
This [1] seems to be a fairly representative article of the sort of thing I've seen. Not peer reviewed, but it hardly seems like fringe lunacy. [1] https://elemental.medium.com/how-one-covid-19-doctor-became-a-ventilator-whistleblower-a1c2dbdd1b06 https://elemental.medium.com/how-one-covid-19-doctor-became-...
- tptacek 6y ago
  Can you provide a source that wasn't written by a (checks notes) magician?
  - war1025 6y ago
    I don't particularly care about the topic, so no.
martinald 6y ago
Not an expert, but as far as I understand with COVID people were not in major distress breathing even with very poor O sats, which is confusing. The standard was to move people with terrible O2 sats at the start of the outbreak to ventilation immedatley, even if they did not seem to bad. That seems to be replaced with providing high levels of O2/CPAP and only moving people to ventilation when that is not sufficient, even if O2 sats would normally indicate ventilation. This is why vent usage is a lot lower this second time round, even with more patients in hopsital.
- saberdancer 6y ago
  I am not an expert either. I would be surprised if they put someone on a ventilator just because his O2 level was low without first putting him on O2 and maxing out the flow. Little experience that I do have is that people are first put on O2, then if their saturation remains low they increase the flow until they can increase no more. At that moment they are a candidate for a ventilator. Maybe they "relaxed" the criteria after a while if ventilators showed bad outcomes but when people are maxed out on O2, there is little you can do.

war1025 6y ago

This [1] seems to be a fairly representative article of the sort of thing I've seen. Not peer reviewed, but it hardly seems like fringe lunacy. [1] https://elemental.medium.com/how-one-covid-19-doctor-became-a-ventilator-whistleblower-a1c2dbdd1b06 https://elemental.medium.com/how-one-covid-19-doctor-became-...

tptacek 6y ago
Can you provide a source that wasn't written by a (checks notes) magician?
- war1025 6y ago
  I don't particularly care about the topic, so no.

martinald 6y ago

Not an expert, but as far as I understand with COVID people were not in major distress breathing even with very poor O sats, which is confusing. The standard was to move people with terrible O2 sats at the start of the outbreak to ventilation immedatley, even if they did not seem to bad. That seems to be replaced with providing high levels of O2/CPAP and only moving people to ventilation when that is not sufficient, even if O2 sats would normally indicate ventilation. This is why vent usage is a lot lower this second time round, even with more patients in hopsital.

saberdancer 6y ago
I am not an expert either. I would be surprised if they put someone on a ventilator just because his O2 level was low without first putting him on O2 and maxing out the flow. Little experience that I do have is that people are first put on O2, then if their saturation remains low they increase the flow until they can increase no more. At that moment they are a candidate for a ventilator. Maybe they "relaxed" the criteria after a while if ventilators showed bad outcomes but when people are maxed out on O2, there is little you can do.