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Medicine United States

General Motors' First Ventilators Are Ready For Delivery (arstechnica.com) 113

Posted by BeauHD from the ready-to-ship dept.
On Tuesday, General Motors revealed that its first ventilators are ready for delivery. "The automaker has a contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services to license-build 30,000 Ventec Life Systems V+ Pro critical care ventilators," reports Ars Technica. "These ventilators are designed to treat the most critically ill patients, who need invasive intubation (tubes inserted into the lungs) as opposed to non-invasive machines like CPAP or BiPAP devices, which are also often referred to as ventilators." Ars Technica reports: GM says that it will ship the first 600 ventilators by the end of April, with "almost half the order" ready by the end of June and the full 30,000 by the end of August. The company has the capacity to produce more if needed. The automaker has leveraged its logistics chain and worked with suppliers to source parts and assemblies, and it has worked closely with Ventec to make these urgently needed medical devices.
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General Motors' First Ventilators Are Ready For Delivery More

General Motors' First Ventilators Are Ready For Delivery

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    • Of course it would be nice if we started earlier, but it looks like, somehow, we may end up with enough...

      You can likely thank a number of US state governors for that.

      • Re:This is good to hear (Score:5, Insightful)

        by RandomUsername99 ( 574692 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @10:22PM (#59953042)

        First, you should blame the people in charge of the national stockpile, which was specifically created to allow states to rely on in case of an emergency like this, and also choose to supplement it with their own stockpile. Jared Kushner— a real estate executive who's being consulted on these matters for some inconceivable goddamned reason— blasted states for relying on the national stockpile, but even as he spoke, the website specifically said that's what it was for. So, you can blame the people whose job it wasn't, or you can blame the people whose job it was.

        • You mean the stockpile that Obama depleted and didn't restock?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Baleet ( 4705757 )
            Yes and no. The one that was depleted during the Obama administration, that should have been restocked during the Trump administration. Of course, Trump had left the pandemic plan developed by the Obama administration on the shelf, fired the pandemic experts from the CDC, and recalled the epidemiologists who would have reported the Wuhan virus outbreak to the CDC from China. So, plenty of blame to go around.
            • Don't you really mean the stockpile that was depleted by the Obama administration in 2009 and should have been restocked by the Trump administration in 2017?

              • Gotta love passing the buck. So if you were renting a house for 3 years, and you never bothered to check or replace the batteries in the smoke detectors during that time, it would be the previous occupant's fault for not replacing them when the house burns down?

                • So Obama's administration used up the stockpile and did nothing for 8 years, and the person most responsible for that is Trump? Stockpiles at best replaced when used, not left empty for 8 years. When I use parts/materials around the house/boat, which I know will need to be available in the future (i.e. furnace filters, water pump impellers, gaskets, light bulbs, etc.) -- I replace them in an expeditious manner because otherwise, it is likely to be forgotten. This is obvious and a best practice -- use it, re

                  • No, Trump has no responsibility for what happened during Obama's 8 years. But he has 100% responsibility for things that happen during his presidency. Last I checked, we are 3 years in, the pandemic is happening on his watch. He's been plenty busy 'fixing' a bunch of other things that happened in the Obama administration. So he should have had plenty of time to fix the issues with the stockpile, but unfortunately, it seems that isn't something that was high on his priority list.

                    • In that regard, I do believe Trump should have understood all the utter screwups he inherited from the Obama administration and should have spent more time/effort resolving all of them -- so we do agree on that.
          • As Terry Tate Office Linebacker would say: You kill the Joe you make some mo! It's Obama's fault if he used them and didn't replace them. I'll give him a mulligan on anything used in the last year of his 8, but anything in years 1-7 was his responsibility to replenish. That being said, we've never had a respiratory panic in all 50 states in the last 100 years so it's easy to see why no politician would want to spend the kind of money that is being spent right now before this happened. They all have vot

          • That would have been a great excuse if this happened two years ago.

      • Of course it would be nice if we started earlier, but it looks like, somehow, we may end up with enough...

        You can likely thank a number of US state governors for that.

        Or you could simply check and find out who is responsible.

        General Motors awarded $490M government contract to build ventilators [freep.com]

        General Motors has been awarded a U.S. government contract worth nearly $490 million to build ventilators amid the coronavirus crisis, the automaker confirmed early Wednesday.

        But, "too good to check," right?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        State Governors can't invoke the war powers act. Only Trump can. You must think him.

        By the way, did you realize that NY didn't even use half the ventilators they already had? So Trump was right about this as he always is and the Press and Democrats were wrong again.

    • They were forced by law to do so, they didn't just do it out of philantropy

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      of course the job was rushed and quality was impacted, its freaking GM, they cant even make a half decent car that isnt falling apart on the lot

  • But (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can I get it with mag wheels?

  • I'm glad to see the USA still has some real factories left.

    China has been exploiting pretty much slave labor to corner manufacturing. While China does have a middle class, the regional-migrant workers who do most the factory work are treated like second-class citizens outside of their region. Commies can get away with shit that open systems can't.

  • Honestly kind of amazing. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:11PM (#59952748)
    I know these aren't the most high-tech devices in the world, such as CPUs, but it's still impressive that a company whose manufacturing assembly lines are set up to churn out automobiles can about-face and produce these in a few weeks.

    Very cool.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Some brands can design, make and deliver on time.
      • On time? There's barely a need for these things anymore.

        • I think there will be a need for them come about September or maybe even earlier when distancing gets rolled back for social and political purposes and there's a second wave of infections.

          But there was a story in the NY Times I think where they were finding that a number of patients were better off without ventilators, like having them sit up or roll over often improved O2 levels back to near normal.

          This is proving to be a very weird disease that defies a lot of conventional treatment models for its present

        • With the curve flattening there's already talk about reopening, even though that would result in the curve climbing again. Anyone that jumps the gun is going to need those ventilators, and they'll be handy to have around for the next flu pandemic even if we don't have a second wave of SARS2 this fall.

        • The midwest is having a bit of an issue. All those states that boasted about not shutting anything down are having hot spots pop up now. Things are about to get ugly in Nebraska.

      • GM would have gone tits up in 2008 had big daddy government not stepped in and wrote a check.

    • Re:Honestly kind of amazing. (Score:4, Informative)

      by careysub ( 976506 ) on Thursday April 16, 2020 @10:53AM (#59955030)

      I know these aren't the most high-tech devices in the world, such as CPUs, but it's still impressive that a company whose manufacturing assembly lines are set up to churn out automobiles can about-face and produce these in a few weeks. Very cool.

      It is, but it is helpful to understand what happened here. This expanded ventilator production would be more accurately described as Ventec Life Systems/GM production. Ventec is actually expanding production of its own ventilator in a facility provided by GM, with GM's support and resources.

    • Auto, appliance companies rapidly retooled to make tanks, jeeps, aircraft, guns, etc.
    • no one seems to respond much to the "end of august" bit ... but it is impressive how money quickly adapts during war-time :p

  • Consumer cash back? (Score:3)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:14PM (#59952752)

    Can you get some consumer cash back?
    How about some 0% APR?
    What is the dealer holdback on these?
    What about the invoice price?

    • For those readers that didn't know, GM makes cars in order to sell auto loans. They pioneered the marketing around getting people into a new model, as the "old" model was no longer fashionable.

    • Just saw that Dodge is offering 0% loans for 84 months now. I wouldn't mind a nice Alfa Giulia but nobody buys Italian cars for their reliability.

  • It's a good sign but... (Score:3)

    by ddtmm ( 549094 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:16PM (#59952758)
    It's too bad that the White House is more focused on creating a good image than helping everyone through this. The irony is if they would just do the right things to curb the spread, the economy will pick up in the shortest time possible. Good for GM, and Ventec, although I can't help but think that GM is only doing this because they have to. It's really looking lie the Feds are doing whatever they can to protect themselves as opposed to doing what's best. Irony once again, is that helping the public is what will help their image the most. We'll see how this progresses in the following weeks...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re "is more focused on creating a good image"....
      Getting medical support for the USA domestically is not a "good image".. its an actual working product for the USA...
      Thats great work.
      Re "only doing this".. government say make something... brands say make something... something is designed, made and is ready...
      Thats actual "doing" in the USA for the USA.

    • What are you talking about, exactly? I haven't closely followed the GM thing - but how do you begin with:

      - It's too bad that the White House is more focused on creating a good image than helping everyone through this

      and then say:

      - Good for GM, and Ventec, although I can't help but think that GM is only doing this because they have to

      Isn't the "have to" - the DPA / white house, and isn't that helping everyone through this?

      Some cursory criticisms seem to be that it wasn't invoked earlier ?

      Serious curiosity -

      • Orange man bad for invoking early 20th century wartime laws to force companies to retool for national security. GM good for doing bad orange man thing.
  • But can I strap a turbo to it, overvolt the pump slightly, and get like 10% more horsepower out of it? What's the fastest they got those babies up to officially? I bet I could hit 5.2 breathes per second with some tweaks and maybe converting to run on Ethanol.
  • Before everyone catches on to how overhyped this whole situation is.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DanDD ( 1857066 )

      Better yet, keep making them to offset the ones we should never again buy from the Chicoms.

  • The question is, who will get the new ventilators they are making?

    The thing is, that hospital admissions in NYC are down, so they are not short of ventilators currently. NYC is by far the worst hotspot in the country, with all other areas doing way better.

    In fact in the U.S. is there a single area of the US that has an actual shortage of ventilators now? Not that I could find. All stories describing shortages are based on PROJECTED needs, which have been way too high all along and continue to be so, even

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DanDD ( 1857066 )

      The real question is, where are these ventilators usually manufactured? I'll bet most, if not all of the Ventec ventilator components are manufactured in.... China!

      The next question is, if a car company can start cranking out these ventilators in about a month, why are any of them made in China?

      When this pandemic subsides, where do you think these ventilators will be made? I'll betcha... China!

      Some high percentage of all products deemed critical to run an economy such as drugs, healthcare products, transp

      • The fact a car company can start cranking them out in a month is probably why they're manufactured in China.

    • Agreed. It's not a bad thing to build up stockpiles, if nothing else perhaps the US could share with the next country that gets hit in a big way. But seems like this bullet has been dodged for now. There also seemed to be an excess of attention on the ventilators, which as an elctro-mechanical device seemingly every 'maker' wanted to take a crack at.

      Testing, in particular antibody testing, is the real key to ending this mess. Where's the 'Zooniverse' for that? Biohackers, now is the time to shine.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Octorian ( 14086 )

        There also seemed to be an excess of attention on the ventilators, which as an elctro-mechanical device seemingly every 'maker' wanted to take a crack at.

        Probably because everyone wants to "do their part," and it seems like something they can get all excited about attempting to contribute to.

        That being said, I keep wondering if the ventilator obsession (beyond a point) will turn out to be a knee-jerk reaction based on an early rallying cry everyone spent too much time talking about. I say that, because I keep getting the impression that these sorts of ventilators really aren't (and/or may turn out not to be) the correct treatment for the disease. It may end

      • Where's the 'Zooniverse' for that? Biohackers, now is the time to shine.

        Now that is a really interesting question, what are this people doing about the Coronavirus? Surely there has to be someone who has tried out a homemade vaccine, or some home-made detection kit...

        It would be really interesting to see what home scientists are coming up with, if anything at all.

    • Re:That's nice. Who needs them? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:57PM (#59952978)

      The question is, who will get the new ventilators they are making?

      Hopefully no one.

      As a result, the need for ventilators is just not as extreme as forecast and there's no shortage even as we enter into a phase where infections and hospital admissions are winding down.

      So while it's great that we have extra ventilators going into a national stockpile, the likelihood anyone will need them this year is very slim.

      The only places with major outbreaks that are getting close to eradicating it are South Koran and China... if you believe them.

      Most everyone else is trending down but still confirming hundreds or thousands of confirmed cases per day.

      Just how much longer are people going to keep self-isolating at this level? One month? Two? What happens to the infection rate when we start easing restrictions?

      Without a vaccine the end game for this is herd immunity, for which you need about 60-70% of the population infected (varies based on social distancing and such).

      New York has a population of ~20,000,000 and 214,000 confirmed cases. Even if you assume only 10% of cases are confirmed (ie, the reported number is 10x too small) that's only about 10% of the population of New York that's now immune. For the US as a whole there's ~600,000 confirmed cases (extrapolate to 6 million) works out to about 2% of the population.

      That's a very long way to go. Without a medical breakthrough (vaccine, mass testing, super-effective new treatment) I don't see how even New York is at the peak of demand.

      No one is riding social distancing all the way to herd immunity, this is all a tactic to buy time to either find that medical breakthrough or build up enough medical supplies, like ventilators, to ride out the pandemic.

      For comparison, the 2009 Swine Flu epidemic, that did have a vaccine for most of the outbreak, infected 60 million Americans before it burned out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I really hope you are right because if they are saying 30k ventilators by August that suggests they are expecting to need a lot of ventilators four or five months from now.

        Let's hope it doesn't take that long.

        • I really hope you are right because if they are saying 30k ventilators by August that suggests they are expecting to need a lot of ventilators four or five months from now.

          Let's hope it doesn't take that long.

          Well I'm curious to see the reason for the disconnect between my analysis and all this talk that we've "hit the peak" combined with the stock market rally.

          Everyone is still saying a vaccine is about a year away, millions of tests per day are super hard to do, and while some treatments look promising I'm not hearing about 90% drops in mortality (and the mortality rates in NYC include a lot of those treatments).

          If those likely conditions hold everything still points to a very significant lockdown for at least

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Matt ( 78254 )
      What I wonder about is, even if we make tens of thousands of ventilators, we're not going to be making that many more doctors / nurses / technicians to use them properly. I haven't heard anyone talk about that.

      • Just get retired health care professionals to come back like some places. Nothing like sending older people to fight a disease that kills off older people.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Then you haven't been listening. Have you considered a single Cuomo briefing?

    • Re:That's nice. Who needs them? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @11:04PM (#59953166)
      Consider this: they're free.

      Auto sales are dropping through the floor. We're either going to be paying them welfare, or paying GM to pay them to do nothing, or we can pay them to make ventilators we still might need.

      We can debate whether this is entirely true, but when you're writing trillion dollar checks for nothing in particular, spending roughly 0% of that much on ventilators isn't hard to defend.

    • Not only do we have enough ventilators, it is starting to be suspected that ventilators are not the best standard of care and we would be better off just giving them high oxygen or even putting them in a hyperbaric chamber. If you think there is a shortage of ventilators and ventilators are hard to make, just wait until we need 100k hyperbaric chambers.

      • it is starting to be suspected that ventilators are not the best standard of care and we would be better off just giving them high oxygen or even putting them in a hyperbaric chamber

        Or a BIPAP machine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

      Considering they're now noticing that ventilators often put too much pressure on an already weakened lung, probably killing more people than corona itself, I'm guessing they are now much more careful who they give them to...

      • Considering they're now noticing that ventilators often put too much pressure on an already weakened lung, probably killing more people than corona itself, I'm guessing they are now much more careful who they give them to...

        Or just stop using them wrong.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Why is it so easy to post garbage and get it modded insightful?

      The problem isn't a shortage of ventilators NOW, it's a possible shortage SOON, and while projections may turn out to be too high that is NOT certain to be true as demand could increase, especially if you list4en to dumbasses like SuperKendall.

      The fact that projections may turn out to be in error does not mean the process used to make the projections was in error. Those ventilators could be still be critical, and even if they aren't it is still

      • Exactly, there are already protests demanding the reopen the economy even thought we're barely flattening as it is. Better to have too many ventilators than not enough anyway.

  • Half of them ready by end-June (Score:3)

    by khchung ( 462899 ) on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @08:58PM (#59952834) Journal

    If America still needed that many ventilators by end-June, then you people have a much bigger problem than just the lack the ventilators.

    Can you imagine the lockdown to continue for another 2.5 months? If America still has not got the virus under control, how bad it would be, both for the economy and the number of direct deaths?

    Since 9 March, Italy got the virus somewhat under control after 3 weeks of lockdown, and now after their new cases are coming down slowly, they are already planning the exit of lockdown. So the whole deal took around 2 months.

    If the state governors would do a passable job of just doing what Italy has done, the virus should be contained before end of May.

    The order for ventilators came 1-2 months too late. Likely only those delivered before end-May would make any difference.

    • Re:Half of them ready by end-June (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday April 15, 2020 @09:51PM (#59952964) Journal

      If America still needed that many ventilators by end-June, then you people have a much bigger problem than just the lack the ventilators.

      If Trump convinces governors to re-open before we get adequate testing and contact tracing infrastructure in place, we'll need a lot more than that.

      You seem to think that this lockdown thing is something you do for a bit, then just go back to normal. It doesn't work that way... or if it does, the virus will come roaring back, far faster than it did the first time because it will have more, and more dispersed, points of origin to expand from. The fact is that when the lockdown is eased safely, it will be eased, not removed, meaning we'll still keep significant restrictions in place, and we'll need to have an aggressive test, trace and quarantine system in place.

      And even then, it's likely that the virus will get out of control again and we'll have to do another round of lockdown. I was hoping that test-and-trace would be sufficient mitigation, but Singapore has proved that COVID-19 spreads too aggressively for that to do more than slow the growth. It's pretty clear at this point that we're going to be doing this lockdown thing off and on for quite a while, with extensive (but lighter) restrictions in between. We still need testing and tracing, but it looks like it won't quite be enough.

      Perhaps we could remove the lockdown entirely if we massively expanded our testing capacity and made regular testing mandatory for all residents. One proposal suggests that we should aim to test 7% of US residents every day, on a rotating basis. That would result in testing the entire nation (perhaps missing some homeless and other hard-to-track-down people) every two weeks. It would also require us to expand our current ~200k per day testing capacity to over 23M per day. Oh, and we'd probably also have to get pretty hardcore about enforcing quarantine for those who test positive.

      Whatever approach we end up taking, this thing is far from over. Don't think life is going back to normal any time soon.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khchung ( 462899 )

        If America still needed that many ventilators by end-June, then you people have a much bigger problem than just the lack the ventilators.

        If Trump convinces governors to re-open before we get adequate testing and contact tracing infrastructure in place, we'll need a lot more than that.

        You seem to think that this lockdown thing is something you do for a bit, then just go back to normal. It doesn't work that way... or if it does, the virus will come roaring back, far faster than it did the first time because it will have more, and more dispersed, points of origin to expand from. The fact is that when the lockdown is eased safely, it will be eased, not removed, meaning we'll still keep significant restrictions in place, and we'll need to have an aggressive test, trace and quarantine system in place.

        I completely agree with you. I do not expect things to go fully back to normal by end-May, only that there won't be the need for many ventilators, because, presumably, the number of daily new cases would be kept low.

        Of course, if governors re-open before they had a firm grip on the the virus, then all bets are off. That's why I mentioned "If the state governors would do a passable job of just doing what Italy has done". Perhaps hoping they can do a "passible job" is already expecting too much? We will s

      • Perhaps we could remove the lockdown entirely if we massively expanded our testing capacity and made regular testing mandatory for all residents. One proposal suggests that we should aim to test 7% of US residents every day, on a rotating basis. That would result in testing the entire nation (perhaps missing some homeless and other hard-to-track-down people) every two weeks. It would also require us to expand our current ~200k per day testing capacity to
        over 23M per day. Oh, and we'd probably also have to get pretty hardcore about enforcing quarantine for those who test positive.

        The tricky part there is 23m tests a day doesn't mean re-purposing our medical infrastructure to do testing and hiring a bunch of lab techs, it means a massive new infrastructure dedicated to testing.

        Labs are already hitting supply shortages with the current level of testing. It's taken GM this long to do ventilators specifically. How many inputs go into performing a COVID-19 test? How many other GMs need to retool to remove all those bottlenecks.

  • > General Motors revealed that its first ventilators are ready for delivery.

    > GM says that it will ship the first 600 ventilators by the end of April

    So, are they ready now, or will they be ready in two weeks?

  • Nothing like failing upwards.

  • Here's hope their ventilators last more than their cars do and that we won't need to have doctors replacing ventilator components every 6 months, the same way we have mechanics fix our GM cars only to have them break down in record time again and again.

  • This isn't WWII, with multiple factories converted to guns and planes and tanks. They shut down GM then mandated it use a corner of one factory to do this.

    • The story goes more along the lines that GM started converting to making ventilators almost immediately before even being compelled. Then the White House wanted to start a bidding war over the darn machines. GM was already in the process of ramping up production on the ventilators when Trump executed the DPA to... Compel them to do what they were already doing. GM dropped a good deal on the bottom line too. As much as we hate GM cars, they are an American company. They're patriotic about it, and they take c

  • ...does it come with a cup holder?

  • Fortunately, if the IHME projections are to believed, we are past peak resource use with only really NYC facing a serious shortage of beds and equipment:

    https://covid19.healthdata.org... [healthdata.org]

    Additionally, medical professionals are starting to think that invasive ventilation is probably best avoided with COVID patients, which means that patients who might have been put on a ventilator under the initial standard of care are now being treated with other means.

  • The intubation rate flattened earlier than many models predicted for several reasons. Govenors and President cajoled manfacturers to build ventilators.

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