This differential multi-ventilation setup yields increased safety, monitoring and control for each connected patient.

In an ideal world, no one treating patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) would have to connect multiple patients to a single ventilator. However, the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic leaves us in a far from ideal world, and healthcare professionals in hard-hit regions will have to strike a balance between the resources available and the resources their patients need.

In the most extreme case, they might thus have to consider the unseemly solution of connecting multiple patients to a single ventilator.

Simply adding splitters to the breathing circuits is the most rudimentary way of achieving this, but in this way, all systems to monitor and control the parameters for each different patient in the circuit are lost.

Given that patients with COVID-19 need very different and precisely fine-tuned ventilator settings, treating them in this way becomes very hard.

As a Belgian team consisting of anesthesiologists, intensivists and (ventilator) engineers we have, in the past few days, tested circuits with added components to increase the safety, monitoring and control for each patient.

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