We need to develop a strategic reserve of 1,000,000+ emergency ventilators ASAP. These don’t need to be fancy medical ventilators, they just need to work.

In a pandemic, the limited existing ventilator supply and stockpile should be reserved for treating the most critical life-threatening cases.

We need to create an emergency ventilator that can be used for millions of minor cases, including patients who require long-term (15-30 day) ventilation on recovery.

There are ~160,000 ventilators in the US now. (See: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/COVID-19/200214-VentilatorAvailability-factsheet.pdf)

The US alone needs >740,000 ventilators in a Spanish flu-level outbreak. (See: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/upshot/coronavirus-biggest-worry-hospital-capacity.html)

The CDC Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) has only ~10,000 ventilators. (See: CHS)

Ventilators are only valuable when they’re matched to patients in need, so we need to dynamically track ventilator supply and demand by hospital and efficiently distribute additional ventilators to hospitals with the highest unmet demand.

We need to train thousands of people to operate these ventilators. One model showed that the supply of respiratory therapists, not the supply of ventilators, would be the limiting factor in providing respiratory care to patients in hospitals. (See: CHS)

The ideal device will be easy to transport, sanitize, and use in low- and no-power settings. Our design needs to scale to 1M+ devices for < $200/unit and needs to be operable by anyone with < 1 hour of training.

More information on other COVID-19 Projects see Help with COVID.

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