Ventilators

Henry Cooke reported:

When people die from coronavirus, it’s generally because their lungs stop working.

The infection can cause a severe pneumonia, inflaming the air sacs in the lungs and then filling them with fluid, leading to serious trouble breathing without medical assistance.

Luckily, this only appears to happen in a small percentage of coronavirus cases. And if you’re in a hospital when it happens, modern medicine can do the breathing for you with a mechanical ventilator. Oxygen continues to pump through your blood while your lungs slowly recover. 

None of the confirmed coronavirus cases in Aotearoa have been serious enough to require sustained hospital care. And the efforts to “flatten the curve” are designed to make sure that when there are cases that do need serious hospital care, they don’t overwhelm the health system.

And yet nobody can tell me how many ventilators there are in this country. Not the ministry itself, not the minister of health, and not the director general of health Ashley Bloomfield. 

This is because there is no general database of crucial medical equipment in New Zealand. And in the months since this virus made itself known no proper survey appears to have been done.

It almost defies belief that two months in, and no one in central Government has done a stocktake of how many respirators we have – until media starting asking.

And they were even warned as Newsroom reports:

As February progressed and McGuinness heard nothing about ventilator stocks, McGuinness got really worried.

She wrote to Health Minister David Clark on March 2 pointing to overseas ventilator shortages and asking about the situation in New Zealand. 

“How many ICU beds does New Zealand currently have with medical ventilators and how many are currently being used?” she asked. “How many other respiratory devices do we have and do medical professionals consider they are useful (eg are they able to be repurposed into medical ventilators?).

“Has the Ministry of Health been in contact with suppliers or other organisations based in New Zealand that might be capable of manufacturing medical ventilators in preparation for possible outbreaks?” 

She didn’t get a response.

It took two further weeks for the Government to catch on there may be a problem.