Many will be delighted to hear that the government initiative for ventilators are now approved so stock will go from 10,000 to 18,000 and will also be an uprated version.
In addition the Mercedes/F1 continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) (breathing aid) production is to be ramped up.
The common treatment for COVID-19 when people are critically ill is to give the patient sedatives and then deliver oxygen through a tube as a ventilator pumps that oxygen into the lungs
This treatment has been used in China Italy France and now Britain however Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell is casting doubt on whether the ventilator is the best way to treat the disease
The New York doctor is suggesting that a better way to treat the patients might be to saturate their lungs with oxygen without mechanical help
Dr Kyle-Sidell released a video that explains why he thinks this is a better method of saving severely affected COVID-19 patients.
The big problem for patients is that the survival rates of those patients who are treated with a ventilator is lower than one would have expected. One study shows that out of 98 patients who were ventilated only one third of those recovered.
The problem is that the lungs become full of a yellow mucus which physically prevents the oxygen being taken into the body.
Pneumonia usually affects one lung or the other so eventually the diaphragm muscles tire and and the ventilator aids the flow of sufficient oxygen to be taken into the body through the one available lung.
Covid-19 patients unusually have both of their lungs infected almost entirely.
If the mucus blocks the passage of oxygen into the bloodstream normally the ventilator would be turned up to compensate at the same time the patients will be treated to attempt to drain the fluid from the lungs. The problem is turning up the ventilator damages the lungs.
Dr Cameron Kyle-Sidell’s treatment is to use the diminished capacity of the lungs to the maximum effect by saturating them with oxygen.
He has likened the Covid-19 disease to altitude sickness where the problem is not the mechanical ventilation of the lungs but extracting the available oxygen and getting it circulating around the body.
The problem for doctors is that this disease has only been in existence for eight weeks and the medical community is still trying to work out how best to treat the covid-19 symptoms.
There are other doctors who are now of a similar opinion Dr Luciano Gattinoni of Germany’s medical University of Gottingen and professor Sherif Sultan President of the International Society of vascular surgery.
This is effectively oxygen starvation and often when patients arrive at hospital they are bright and alert but with very low blood oxygen levels, they can be very chatty one minute and then dramatically deteriorate and collapse.
Interestingly when Boris Johnson the UK prime minister was admitted to hospital it was oxygen treatment that he received and not sedated ventilation.
Time will tell whether the oxygen treatment is a more successful route to recovery, if so it will be the CPAP breathing aids that will be more in demand as opposed to the ventilators!
Fortunately that production line is successfully producing the machines courtesy of the F1 team Mercedes and Airbus.
