RUTHFULLY YOURS

An American hallmark is that Americans take the initiative, creating for themselves whatever is necessary to get the job done. Indeed, back in the late 19th century, when Thomas Alva Edison was a whirlwind of inventions, Americans began to view themselves as a nation of inventors. The inspiration for Rube Goldberg’s fantastic, crazy cartoon ideas was the fact that invention was in the air.

People from all 50 states and every educational and ethnic background flooded the newspapers and the patent office with their ideas. It was from that intellectual ferment that we got assembly lines, adding machines, shredded wheat, smoke detectors, Ferris wheels, rotary dials, bottle caps, zippers, modern mousetraps, medical gloves, mufflers, ice cream scoops, and no end of other clever and useful things that are still part of our world today.

American ingenuity may once again come to the fore with coronavirus. One of the biggest concerns about the virus is that hospitals are worried that they will not have enough ventilators for all the people who need them.

In Italy, ventilators make the difference between living and dying. An Israeli doctor who has been working in Italy said that the current triage is to deny the available ventilators to any patients over 60:

Israeli M.D. Gai Peleg, who is currently working to save lives in Parma, Italy, told Channel 12 that things are only getting worse as the number of patients keeps growing.

[snip]

Peleg said that, from what he sees and hears in the hospital, the instructions are not to offer access to artificial respiratory machines to patients over 60, as such machines are limited in number.

Israel, as it always does when there’s a crisis in the world, is helping out by purchasing thousands of respiratory machines to send to Italy, but that may not be enough.

Ventilators are so important they may even affect a politician’s future prospects. Democrats, looking at the wreck of Joe Biden and Bernie’s unelectable socialism, are making goo-goo eyes at Governor Andrew Cuomo, who appears strong in video messages. They’ve conveniently forgotten that part of why New York is in such dire straits with its rapidly rising number of coronavirus patients is because, on Cuomo’s watch, New York made the political decision not to get ventilators:

It’s a little late. Several years ago, after learning that the Empire State’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than the 18,000 New Yorkers would need in a severe pandemic, state public-health leaders came to a fork in the road.

They could have chosen to buy more ventilators to back up the supplies hospitals maintain. ­Instead, the health commissioner, Howard Zucker, assembled a task force for rationing the ventilators they already had.

[snip]

In 2015, the state could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $576 million. It’s a lot of money, but in hindsight, spending half a percent of the budget to prepare for pandemic was the right thing to do.

Incidentally, the state did find $500 million to provide taxpayer-funded healthcare for 400,000 adult illegal aliens.

That’s water (and lives) under the bridge, though. In the here and now, an Anesthesiology fellow at the University of Minnesota thinks he may have figured out a fast way to build an affordable ventilator:

University of Minnesota Anesthesiology fellow Dr. Steve Richardson started work on his ventilator last Sunday, sourcing equipment and resources from biomedical engineer friends and other private companies.

Within hours of starting, Richardson finished a simple, effective prototype that he is now perfecting.

He says if the FDA clears a path for production, he could scale it quickly, producing thousands within three weeks at a fraction of the cost of a traditional hospital ventilator.

“People have just been working around the clock every day since Sunday morning, and we have a ventilator that I would be comfortable being anesthetized with,” Richardson said.

Thank goodness the American spirit lives on. Otherwise, the government, especially the government in Democrat hands, may very well get us all killed.