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Ventilators in sentence

77 examples of Ventilators in a sentence

The Perverse Economics of VentilatorsMANCHESTER – As the coronavirus has spread around the world, the need for ventilators has soared.
And in the United States, President Donald Trump has finally invoked the 1950 Defense Production Act and ordered General Motors to make ventilators.
Not surprisingly, the situation is far worse in poorer countries, where the supply of available ventilators is minimal and money to acquire more is scarce.
In the Central African Republic, for example, there are just three ventilators for the entire country; in Liberia, there is reportedly only one.
Bangladesh has fewer than 2000 ventilators for a population of more than 160 million.
But even if countries maintained a “strategic reserve” of ventilators, they probably would not have enough to meet current needs.
Nonetheless, today’s critical shortage of ventilators (and of diagnostics and therapeutics) is also a symptom of structural flaws in the prevailing economic model.
As Bernard Olayo of the Center for Public Health and Development in Kenya points out, even if poor countries could afford the necessary supply of ventilators, many still would lack enough people qualified to operate them.
Alongside the more sophisticated ventilators, we could have developed simpler, more affordable, and more user-friendly models.
In 2012, however, the company was acquired by a large medical-device manufacturer that produced “traditional” ventilators, as part of a wider process of industry concentration that has raised questions related to competition and antitrust law.
Owing to our reliance on market forces to allocate resources for innovation, we now only produce ventilators that are expensive, immobile, proprietary, highly technical, and difficult to use, when what we really need are affordable, mobile, simple, user-friendly machines.
The disastrous shortage of ventilators in the face of COVID-19 should make clear that, particularly in essential domains like public health, we need to rethink what we mean by innovation and how we direct and pursue it.
It was used only in select cases, for example when directing 3M to prioritize US government orders for N95 face masks and barring the company from exporting them, or when directing General Motors to manufacture ventilators.
But it is clear that the market, left to its own devices, does not produce a sufficient quantity of personal protective equipment, ventilators, and therapeutic drugs.
Facemasks, ventilators, and vaccinations are neither private nor public goods.
Facemasks, ventilators, and vaccinations are social goods: their provision benefits society, and government must not hesitate to ensure adequate supplies.
After a 12-year effort to spur the private sector to develop low-cost ventilators, the US government is now learning that outsourcing is not a reliable way to ensure emergency access to medical equipment.
An analysis of international trade data shows that Hungary paid the most in the EU for ventilators from China, at one point paying over 50 times more than Germany.
Therefore, containing the COVID-19 pandemic now requires a wide range of other interventions, from producing enough ventilators and other medical equipment for intensive-care units, to making accurate diagnostics and effective therapeutics widely available.
Health-care systems are weak and overburdened, with ten African countries reportedly having no ventilators at all.
Re-equipping factories to produce ventilators for patients and personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical personnel, for example, takes time.
Envisaging a situation in which there would not be enough ventilators for all patients needing one, a working group of the Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation, and Intensive Care reluctantly supported rationing by age, while also taking into account frailty and the severity of any other health problems.
Manufacturing more ventilators thus calls for close coordination at a time when many countries’ first instinct is to compete for scarce parts.
Trade skeptics might argue the opposite, claiming that coordination problems could be avoided altogether if the supply chain for ventilators were brought home, as in the case of food.
For starters, the US has limited capacity to produce the swabs, ventilators, face masks, and protective gear that its hospitals need.
European institutions now need to devise ways to supplement member states’ responses by funding research, procuring protective equipment and ventilators, sharing information, participating in global discussions, upholding the single market, and even developing “Corona Bonds.”
Countries have little testing equipment, few (if any) ventilators, limited medical supplies, and often poor sanitation and insufficient running water.
We must also crack down on medical piracy, whereby a few countries seek to monopolize testing kits, ventilators, and personal protective equipment by whatever means, instead of joining a coordinated international effort to increase their global supply.
There are fewer than 500 ventilators in Nigeria, a country of 200 million people – roughly two-thirds the population of the United States, which has 172,000 ventilators.
Resources – from personal protective equipment to testing kits to ventilators – should be allocated according to need.
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