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Yeah, I’m still figuring it out, but this. An ICU is the most complex place in a hospital and probably the *hardest* for improvised emergency clinics to replicate. To reduce load on hospitals, maybe we *first* scale up the *other* stuff.
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Everyone talking about #makeventilators is missing the point. Yes, we're going to run out. No, it won't be pretty. But we don't have labor capacity to care for that many more than we can ventilate. We need O2 concentrators so that 2/3 of hospital cases can switch to home care.
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You take the *simplest* tasks which are usually done by skilled experts (doctors & nurses) and delegate them to non-credentialed workers or volunteers who go through a brief training course.
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Medically skilled personnel are a scarce resource in a crisis like COVID19; the smart thing to do is to reserve them for those tasks that are most difficult to learn to perform safely.
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When people have life-threatening cases of COVID19, the treatments they need are the *hardest* to task-shift to the untrained. Very invasive, very easy to accidentally kill someone by screwing up. It might be easier to scale up routine care instead.
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