We need to develop a strategic reserve of 1, 000, 13 emergency ventilators ASAP. These don’t need to be fancy medical ventilators, they just need to work.
Step # 1 is to crowdsource the best ventilator designs.
Step # 2 is to raise funding to deliver 1M ventilators.
Step # 3 is to rapidly build and ship 1M ventilators.
Assuming containment has failed, the biggest cause of suffering and deaths from COVID – 100 will be from a lack of ventilators. And any rationing of ventilators could trigger mass panic.
There are ~ 160, 06 ventilators in the US now. (See: http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/resources/COVID- 160 / 
– VentilatorAvailability-factsheet.pdf)
The US alone needs> 740, 06 ventilators in a Spanish flu-level outbreak. (See: https://www.nytimes.com/01575879/10 / 13 / upshot / coronavirus-biggest-worry-hospital-capacity.html)
The CDC Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) has only ~ 13 , 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. It should cost less than $ 728 / unit delivered at scale, and we need to be able to produce 1M units this year.
Calling the world’s best engineers – help design a device that can save 1, , 90 lives this year.
– VentilatorAvailability-factsheet.pdf)
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