U.S. hospitals barely avoided a ventilator shortage that would’ve forced doctors to choose who did or didn’t get care.
As American doctors watched their Italian counterparts deny ventilators to senior citizens with coronavirus earlier this year, they clamored for more devices and prepared to live out their greatest fear: denying a dying person the care they need because of a shortage.
And, doctors say, the lockdowns and other measures to slow the spread of the virus helped hold down caseloads just enough to make it to the other side of the peak. The number of new coronavirus cases in New York showed signs of reaching a peak in early April. That’s nearly a month earlier than the early May summit that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had predicted in mid-March.
The worst situation has been reported in New York, where doctors say a handful of patients had to split ventilators. “I don’t know to what extent that is still continuing,” Braithwaite said, and he said it’s unlikely that doctors or hospital administrators would discuss it publicly. At SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, where one of the hospital’s emergency medicine doctors did the research proving splitting is possible, a spokesman said the hospital never hooked more than one patient to a single ventilator.
The method is still risky because the oxygen tube can spray the coronavirus around a room as a fine mist. UChicago Medicine said it was able to use this method because it had enough specialized rooms to contain the contamination. Hood said her organization is working with group purchasing organizations, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on a new ventilator reserve that backs up the Strategic National Stockpile.
“We feel much more confident today than we were two or three weeks ago,” Hood said. “We have been adding to the national emergency stockpile as there’s been purchases made from existing stock both in the U.S. and North America and across the globe.”
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