Risky Hack Could Double Access To Ventilators As Coronavirus Peaks

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: An emergency medicine physician says she and a colleague invented a way to connect four patients to a single ventilator, a hack that could significantly increase the capacity of overburdened hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic. Doctors Greg Neyman and Charelene Irvin Babcock published a pilot study of the technique in Academic Emergency Medicine in 2006. Babock is now an emergency medicine physician at a hospital in Detroit, Michigan and posted a YouTube video on March 14 describing the technique. The technique is remarkably simple. “Four sets of standard ventilator tubing were connected to a single ventilator via two flow splitters,” the study said. “Each flow splitter was constructed of three Briggs T-Tubes which included connection adapters with the valves removed.” In Babock’s video, she said the adapters were 22mm in size. Basically, any kind of T-shaped tube can be adapted to extend the ventilator to more than one patient. Babock’s video has gone viral, and she told Motherboard in a phone interview that she put together the four way adapter set in her YouTube video in 15 minutes using supplies her hospital already had. In an interview with Motherboard, Babcock said that actually using it on coronavirus patients is a tough call, but a potentially life-saving one in a last-resort situation. “It’s only been done in test lungs,” she said over the phone. “But it’s probably better than nothing in dire circumstances. We don’t know how bad it’s gonna get. [Italy] is so overwhelmed with people that will die without ventilators and they don’t have enough ventilators. Sometimes trying something almost MacGyverish is better than doing nothing.”