Back of napkin math shows that funding oxygen intervention for India is currently more effective than even top rated interventions from
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Hat tip to Dr. Rohin Francis for identifying the specific opportunity in his excellent video on the crisis India is currently facing: twitter.com/MedCrisis/stat
I've used numbers from covid.giveindia.org/healthcare-her because they were very specific and can handle int'l donations easily.
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A video about what's going on in India
- Summary of the current situation
- Why this matters for all of us
- What went so badly wrong, especially after apparent success
- Interview from the frontline
- HOW YOU CAN HELP
Please donate if you can
youtu.be/DyXq88MrAVQShow this thread
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They claim able to deploy funds within 1-2 weeks. Where details were lacking I checked with an MD I know who has been treating COVID in northern Canada to estimate the impact of various interventions, assuming effective triage and that each item is already a choke point.
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My starting assumptions were:
Avg patient age 50 yo, giving post-survival life expectancy of ~25 years
70 ₹ to 1 USD
Avg 28 oxygen-days needed to save a patient
40 USD to add one year of life expectancy via Givewell top charities
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All assumptions highly conservative. Exchange rate is pre-adjusted to cover payment processing and conversion. Patients are actually skewing younger right now. 4 weeks of oxygen to save just one patient actually assumes triage inefficiency. 40 USD is cheapest estimate given.
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Can you explain why 4 weeks of oxygen to save a life is conservative? (I don't know anything about oxygen) That seems like the biggest question mark in your analysis to me
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This was the conclusion of the MD I spoke to. He estimated that a week of oxygen would be a typical triage intervention if you were bottlenecked, and that up to half of patients would die (eventually) without it. So 4 adds room for ineffective triage.
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Obviously it's possible to use oxygen much less efficiently than this, but the intervention I'm trying to measure is "getting out of the bottleneck", not "how much life does oxygen usually save during a non-crisis".
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For calibration, there are multiple reports out there of even doctors dying due to lack of oxygen. If you can identify such patients with even 1 in 4 accuracy, and a week of oxygen can get them through crisis, then this stat is accurate.
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er what are the odds that they die *with* oxygen, if it's 50% without?
I haven't been able to find any evidence/studies/anecdotes/etc. about the change in mortality rates from getting vs not getting extra oxygen
According to the MD I talked to, most patients being placed on lower interventions during triage (so oxygen concentrators or low flow oxygen) have very high survival rates as long as they don't proceed into crisis. For reference if you get all the way up to a full ventilator...
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...under normal circumstances with supplies/beds/doctors/ventilators ample, your survival rate is in the 50% range. COVID is very survivable if you get what you need.
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