A potential ventilator shortage has made building and buying them a national priority to fight COVID-19. But doctors are becoming less concerned.
Because of these discoveries, doctors — locally and nationally — are beginning to feel increasingly confident they will have enough ventilators to help keep COVID-19 and other patients alive.Mechanical ventilation — which involves heavily sedating a patient and threading a tube down the throat, also known as intubation — can damage the lungs, increase the risk of infection and cause cognitive impairments. Most patients don’t survive.
The increased use of less-invasive therapies is based partly on a growing understanding about the characteristics of the disease. Another option for some patients is a face mask connected to a breathing machine, though the devices pose a threat to hospital staff because they can aerosolize the virus,High flow nasal cannula, which can also pose risk of aerosolization, is recommended for patients over these other devices in guidelines released last week by the National Institutes of Health.
“That’s probably preventing a significant number of patients from needing to be intubated and put on a ventilator,” said Lucian Durham, a Froedtert physician and the hospital's director of mechanical and circulatory support.The success with less-invasive therapies is partly why hospitals, including UW Health, Froedtert Health and Ascension Wisconsin, are becoming more confident they won’t run out of ventilators.
In Wisconsin, 1.6 million people, or 36.5% of the state’s adult population, are at risk of serious illness if infected by the coronavirus, according to an, a national organization that does research on health policy.
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