Enlisting tech to fight coronavirus sparks surveillance fears

The portable supercomputers people carry around in their pockets may hold the key to stemming the coronavirus pandemic, some public health experts say.
In places such as South Korea, Singapore and China, governments are relying on phone location data to carry out extremely precise and targeted “contact tracing” for people who test positive for the virus.
Israel’s domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, tracks people’s cellphone locations, allowing the government to text people who came in contact with a patient who has tested positive. Singapore is taking a similar approach. South Korea is using a mix of location data, digital records and camera footage to track where infected people have been.

In China, a mesh of overlapping systems track people as they move through public transport, taxis, commercial centers, and even specific neighborhoods and buildings, serving to both document where they have been and block potential carriers from moving about and further spreading the disease.
But in the United States, where individual liberty is culturally prized and privacy is enshrined in the Constitution, a tech-based approach faces serious obstacles.
“This is a crisis, and we need to look at everything at our disposal, but we also need to be careful about how we do so,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
“We do have privacy laws that constrain government access to data,” he added.
Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy, put it more bluntly.
“If the government were to take on this kind of surveillance, I think it would be struck down for violating the Fourth Amendment,” she said.
Even abroad, some bristle at the invasiveness of the approach. In South Korea, residents have received text messages detailing the recent whereabouts of people who have tested positive, sometimes to an embarrassing degree, causing an uproar. Israel’s Supreme Court threatened to scrap its system.

Still, some scientists and policymakers say that when it comes to battling a lethal pandemic, technological tracking is a no-brainer, especially when the alternative is economy-killing closures.
“That’s exactly what we need to be doing. Do we want to go into lockdown again?” said Aaron Carroll, a health expert at the Indiana University School of Medicine, who says preventing an endless resurgence of outbreaks will require a combination of widespread testing and contact tracing.
An article published by a group of Oxford scholars in Science, a leading academic journal, suggested that governments would not be able to bring the pandemic under control without some level of technology.
“We conclude that viral spread is too fast to be contained by manual contact tracing, but could be controlled if this process was faster, more efficient and happened at scale,” the authors wrote, noting that a significant portion of the spread occurs before people show symptoms.
“A contact-tracing App which builds a memory of proximity contacts and immediately notifies contacts of positive cases can achieve epidemic control if used by enough people,” they added.
Using technology to contain the virus has found some support on both the right and the left.
A road map from the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) released Friday called for using tech-based contact tracing.
“As a condition of receiving a COVID-19 test in the future, individuals may be required to download the app, which would include their test result,” the plan offered. Others could download it voluntarily to “to see if there are cases in their neighborhood or near their workplace.”
In its own road map released last week, the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute said technology could be used to enforce social isolation.
When asked about the idea on Monday, President Trump seemed to balk.
“So what happens? A siren goes off if you get too close to somebody? That’s pretty severe,” he said.
But he added, “We’re taking a look.”
While there may be benefits to tracking people during the coronavirus pandemic, there are also potential privacy pitfalls, particularly if the federal government is granted emergency powers allowing for more surveillance.
Ashkhen Kazaryan, director of civil liberties at public policy group TechFreedom, compared the current situation to the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, when major surveillance laws were put in place to curb acts of terrorism.

“Unlike with 9/11, we are not at war with a country or a certain group of people. We are at war with the virus,” Kazaryan told The Hill. “The first thing we should require is transparency. There is no need to hide what they are doing.”
Sohn warned of “mission creep” if the federal government is given even limited surveillance powers during the coronavirus crisis.
“The fact of the matter is once you start to expand the government’s powers in this area, it’s very, very hard to limit what they surveil you for,” Sohn emphasized.
Congress is preparing to put a spotlight on the issue next week, when the Senate Commerce Committee plans to hold a paper hearing on the use of big data to fight the spread of the coronavirus. The committee rolled out legislation on consumer privacy last year, but debates involving the impact of coronavirus could put a dent in those efforts.
On Friday, a group of Democratic senators drilled into Apple, sending a letter questioning the company’s recently announced policy that it intended to collect “some information” to improve Apple’s new coronavirus app and website.
“Although, the use of technological innovations and collaboration with the private sector is a necessary component to combating COVID-19, Americans should not have to trade their privacy at the expense of public health needs,” Democratic Sens. Bob Menendez (N.J.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Cory Booker (N.J.), and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) wrote.
“A public health crisis is no excuse for data brokers to whitewash and monetize their intrusive, unethical harvesting of our personal data and location information,” Blumenthal said in a statement to The Hill. “We must balance consumers’ privacy interests with the legitimate needs of public health officials and first responders during the coronavirus pandemic.”
Google also took a first step toward making data more accessible to governments on Friday when the company announced it would begin publishing anonymized GPS data for 131 countries and regions showing how people have moved during the pandemic.
Beyond privacy concerns, questions linger as to whether the government will be able to cobble together workable, user-friendly technology that deals with a slew of state and local health systems.
“I think that this is going to be the second greatest challenge, after what our health care workers are dealing with on the front lines every day,” said Adam Conner, vice president of tech policy at CAP.
“This would make the challenge of the ObamaCare website look small by comparison,” he said, recalling the disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act exchanges in 2013.
Already, Trump has faced backlash for overpromising on a website that would help people find testing location sights near them. Few testing sites have materialized, and the website so far is focused on just a few counties in California.
The ACLU’s Stanley says the combined risk of failure and privacy breach should raise alarms for proponents of the tech-based health surveillance.
“The worst-case scenario is the government creates a mandatory program that involves using the location tracking of every American, utterly fails on a technological level, swamps the system with false positives, creates enormous mistrust and creates rebellion among the population. Then they keep the system online and use it for other purposes,” he said.
“A government that can’t get enough face masks may not be able to make effective use of this data,” he added.
https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/491134-enlisting-tech-to-fight-coronavirus-sparks-surveillance-fears

Testing struggles emerge as key hurdle to reopening country

The U.S. needs to significantly increase its testing capability for the coronavirus in order to safely start reopening the country, experts say.
If the current approach of telling everyone to stay home is to be lifted, widespread and faster testing will be needed to identify infected people for isolation. Easing stay-at-home orders in the absence of sufficient testing would risk reigniting the outbreak.
Leading estimates have called for between 750,000 and 1 million tests per week. On the surface, the U.S. is getting closer to hitting those numbers, after an extremely slow rollout of tests in the initial weeks of the outbreak.

The country is now conducting more than 100,000 tests a day, according to The COVID Tracking Project.
But with a large backlog of cases, many of those samples are awaiting analysis, with an average of four to five days for several testing methods in use. Getting same-day results is crucial for any effective testing system to help reopen the country, according to experts.
They say blunt social distancing measures need to remain in place until the worst has passed and the number of new cases is declining. At that point, having a system of testing and tracing ready to go will be key.
“We better be careful about declaring victory just because you’ve turned the corner on a curve,” Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Thursday on CNN.  “When we turn the corner and it goes down, we have to have in place the ability to do the kind of containment that’s pristine — namely, you test like crazy, you identify people, you isolate them and you do contact tracing.”
Michael Mina, a professor at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said improvements in testing would help ease social distancing measures.
“We’re obviously seeing right now that there are other ways to control a virus without testing, but it’s highly detrimental to the economy and to our lifestyles and pulls at the social fabric of society, frankly. So we obviously can’t just keep social distancing,” he said.

But governors across the country are reporting that their states are struggling with testing.
As of Wednesday, the California Department of Public Health said 59,500 test results were pending, compared with results for just 32,944 tests. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said it’s an issue affecting other states as well.
“This is a national problem,” Newsom told reporters Thursday. “Just one lab in the United States has over 100-plus thousand backlogged tests. Those large commercial labs are overwhelmed by the demand.”
President Trump, on a call with governors Monday, said he did not think testing was a problem anymore. “I haven’t heard about testing in weeks,” Trump said, according to audio obtained by The New York Times.
Governors pushed back on his remarks.
“Yeah, that’s just not true,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) told NPR on Tuesday. “I mean, I know that they’ve taken some steps to create new tests, but they’re not actually produced and distributed out to the states.”
“No state has enough testing,” he added.
Some hard-hit areas have limited testing to people who are hospitalized and front-line health workers. There are also persistent problems with shortages of supplies needed to conduct tests, including reagents, chemicals used to process the tests.
“There are widespread shortages of specimen collection materials, personal protective equipment, test kits and reagents,” said a spokesperson for the American Clinical Laboratory Association. “All of these factors impact the ability of laboratories to push through testing backlogs and steadily increase capacity.”
There are some signs the situation is improving.
Abbott Laboratories announced it had been approved at the end of March for a point-of-care test that can deliver results in as little as five minutes, a development touted by Trump.
Darcy Ross, an Abbott spokeswoman, told The Hill that by the end of Friday, the company will have shipped more than 191,000 of the rapid tests to 21 states.

Experts also point to the importance of a different kind of test, called a serology test, that looks for antibodies in the blood. The analysis can determine if someone has had the virus before, not just whether they have it while being tested. That means the serology test can help identify people who have had the virus but are now immune and who can more fully reenter society.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the first coronavirus serology test on Thursday, from a company called Cellex.
In addition to testing capacity, states will also need enough public health workers to be able to carry out the tracing of infected people and their close contacts.
“We need an army of contact tracers in every community of the U.S.,” Tom Frieden, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on a call with reporters Wednesday.
Staffing, therefore, could be a problem.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) is launching one of the country’s most aggressive contact tracing efforts by enlisting more than 1,200 public health college students to help, according to The Boston Globe.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Wednesday that he thinks the Trump administration needs to do more to ramp up testing and staffing for contact tracing.
“Other countries taught us we cannot turn the corner on coronavirus [without] a comprehensive system of TESTING, TRACING, and QUARANTINE,” he tweeted. “The Trump Administration has zero plan to stand up that system nationally. That’s frightening and it must change.”
Experts said preparedness needs to be ramped up quickly.
“Once the rate of infections has been slowed by social (really physical) distancing, only a testing scheme far beyond our current capabilities can prevent another surge in infections,” Aaron Carroll, a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine, wrote in The Atlantic on Tuesday. “If we are going to get out of lockdown, we need to radically improve our testing protocols and infrastructure. And we need to do it fast.”
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/491128-testing-struggles-emerge-as-key-hurdle-to-reopening-country

CDC launches studies to get more precise count of undetected Covid-19 cases

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun preliminary studies to try to determine how many Americans have already been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, an agency official revealed Saturday. On Friday, the agency said nearly 240,000 people in the country have been infected with the virus and nearly 5,500 have died.
Joe Bresee, deputy incident manager for the CDC’s pandemic response, said the agency hopes to flesh out the portion of cases that have evaded detection using three related studies.
The first, which has already begun, will be looking at blood samples from people never diagnosed as a case in some of the nation’s Covid-19 hot spots, to see how widely the virus circulated. Later, a national survey, using samples from different parts of the country, will be conducted. A third will look at special populations — health care workers are a top priority — to see how widely the virus has spread within them. Bresee said the CDC hopes to start the national survey in the summer; he gave no timeline for the health workers study.

“We’re just starting to do testing and we’ll report out on these very quickly,” Bresee said at a media briefing. “We think the serum studies will be very important to understand what the true amount of infection is out in the community.”
These studies — called sero-surveys — involve drawing blood from people never diagnosed as a case to look for antibodies to the virus. They are conducted by taking a representative sample of people in a city, for instance, ensuring people from different age groups are included.

It’s known that many people have mild infections when they contract Covid-19. Data from China and elsewhere suggests about 80% of people confirmed to have the infection have mild or moderate symptoms.
But it is also assumed that figure may in fact be low — that more people may have already encountered and fended off the virus than have been detected. There have been reports, for instance, from the Diamond Princess cruise ship involving people who tested positive who recounted having no symptoms at all. The ship was the first of several cruise ships on which the virus circulated widely; nearly 20% of passengers and crew on the ship eventually tested positive for the virus.
Getting a sense of how many mild and asymptomatic cases there are helps authorities plan for future responses to Covid-19 activity. If it’s known that a high percentage of people in a community were likely infected when the virus moved through during its first wave of infections, the response to a reappearance later might be tailored to protect only high-risk people, for instance.
This work is part of ramped-up coronavirus surveillance at the CDC. The agency has been adapting a number of surveillance systems used to record the toll of seasonal flu in the United States to get a near-real-time picture of SARS-CoV-2’s march across the country.

On Friday, the CDC published the first of what will be a weekly Covid-19 surveillance report, based on the model of its longtime influenza report, FluView. The report is based on data from the last week of March. It showed that in that week, nearly 76,000 Americans had been tested for the infection, with nearly 11,000, or 14.5%, testing positive.
It also showed that pneumonia and influenza deaths, which would normally be falling at this time of year as flu season starts to abate, are increasing. Pneumonia deaths have been rising sharply since the end of February — because of Covid-19.
The new surveillance systems will allow the CDC to add context to the daily reports of Covid-19 cases and deaths, said Lynnette Brammer, head of CDC’s domestic influenza surveillance system and COVIDView, the new weekly report. It will help the agency determine who is contracting the virus and being hospitalized because of Covid-19 infections, and who is dying from the disease.
“We’re starting to see different trends, but it will take us a while to get really comfortable interpreting this data,” Brammer said.

CDC launches studies to get more precise count of undetected Covid-19 cases

Pandemic modelers providing new COVID-19 insights

As a Yale University postdoctoral researcher, economist Jude Bayham studied the potential consequences of a global pandemic that could shutter schools, close businesses, and strain hospitals. That was back in 2013.

Now, as the world grapples with the coronavirus, the Colorado State University economist and a multi-institutional team are turning those prescient modeling exercises into real insights for policymakers.
“We’re repurposing models we had done a while back that frankly at the time, people didn’t really care about,” said Bayham, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. “It’s an ‘I told you so’ moment. I’m not happy about it. It’s unfortunate.”
In the last several weeks, Bayham and Yale collaborator Eli Fenichel have run a series of analyses illustrating the toll that long-term school closures may have on U.S. health care providers. They’re now fielding inquiries from all over the world, from state governments to child care needs assessment professionals, who think the economists’ work could help them navigate the here and now. In the last two weeks, the researchers created an interactive dashboard for drilling down statistics on child care needs by state, city and industry sector. Their data were published in The Lancet Public Health April 3.
Bayham and Fenichel have also created another dashboard for viewing COVID-19 complication risk factors in the workforce.
A third of health workers care for young children
For their health care worker analysis, the researchers used data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to show that about a third of health care workers—doctors, nurses, hospital staff—care for children ages 3-12. Fifteen percent of those households don’t have other adults or older children who can help with child care.
At the time they did their original analysis, a long-term school closure was a far-off hypothetical. Now, as school districts nationwide shutter for weeks or months, Bayham’s work of yore takes on new significance, and the team is scrambling to update it with current figures.
School closures are intended to slow the transmission of the virus. But Bayham and Fenichel find that the toll school closures take on health care workers could potentially negate any mortality benefits from the closures. Their calculations indicate that if the health care workforce declines by 15 percent, due to the workers now having to care for their children, it could lead to an increase in coronavirus deaths, because the workers aren’t there to care for sick people. Specifically, they report that assuming a 15 percent loss of the health care labor force, a coronavirus infection mortality rate increase of just 0.35 percentage points would net a greater number of deaths than would be prevented by the closures.
These calculations are just that—calculations, which don’t take into account, for example, the potential rollout of state or federal programs to offer child care relief to workers. And the estimates aren’t perfect; the researchers don’t claim to know, down to a precise number, what one health care worker’s absence portends.
“We don’t know, in terms of a productivity measure, the estimate of one nurse saving this many lives or reducing mortality,” Bayham said. “But we think it’s not zero. So essentially we are getting at how productive they need to be for us to be concerned about how school closures would undermine the goal of saving lives.”
The work is a sobering reminder of the societal and public-health tradeoffs of large-scale disruptions like long-term school closures.
Forming networks
As the pandemic continues to unfold, Bayham and colleagues at Yale, Northwestern University and other institutions have quickly formed a network of economists and epidemiologists to continue this and other lines of work. They hope to help inform decisionmakers on questions not only of tradeoffs of school closures, but also, strategies for peeling back such restrictive measures when the time is right.
As researchers all over the world converge their expertise around the pandemic, Bayham and colleagues are also jumping into other projects to help. For example, Bayham is serving on a U.S. Forest Service task force that will examine potential outcomes of coronavirus on firefighters as fire season returns.
And along with department colleagues Becca Jablonski and Dawn Thilmany, Rebecca Clary, Rebecca Hill and Alexandra Hill, he is also serving on a Colorado Department of Agriculture-focused task force looking at effects of social distancing measures on food supply chain issues. CSU’s vice president for engagement and extension, Blake Naughton, established the CSU Task Force on Colorado Food Supply to conduct research on several key areas: food access and security; designating food retail establishments as “essential services;” food supply chain workforce readiness; and consumer expenditure and farm market access.

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Should schools have to close, enlist childcare workers as nannies for health workers

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More information: Link to interactive dashboard with child care needs by state: covid.yale.edu/resources/childcare/Link to interactive dashboard with COVID-19 complication risk factors: foodsystems.colostate.edu/covi … ty-labor-force-risk/ Jude Bayham et al, Impact of school closures for COVID-19 on the US health-care workforce and net mortality: a modelling study, The Lancet Public Health (2020). DOI: 10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30082-7
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-04-what-if-scenarios-real-pandemic-covid-.html

Scripps researchers may have found coronavirus’ Achilles heel

There may be some good news on the coronavirus horizon, as Scripps Research reported it may have found COVID-19’s Achilles heel.
The research shows a specific area of the virus could be “targeted with drugs and other therapies, a finding that also could help with the development of a vaccine,” according to the San Diego Tribune.
The targeted area, according to biologist Ian Wilson, who led the scientific team, “is crucial to spreading the highly contagious virus, and … its composition suggests that it would be vulnerable to drugs.”
The discovery was published Friday in the journal Science and comes as scientists globally are working feverishly to find a vaccine or cure for the pandemic that has devastated global markets and caused more than 63,000 deaths worldwide.
An antibody taken from a SARS patient years earlier was used in the discovery, as researchers realized it had attached itself to a specific part of the virus, and were able to repeat the phenomenon with COVID-19, helping to identify a coronavirus weakness, according to the report.
“That high degree of similarity implies that the site has an important function that would be lost if it mutated significantly,” Scripps Research said in a statement Friday.
Sadly, the weak spot isn’t easy to find.
“We found that this (spot) is usually hidden inside the virus, and only exposed when that part of the virus changes its structure, as it would in natural infection,” Wilson’s colleague, Meng Yuan, said in a statement.
The institute is seeking the public’s help and is looking for COVID-19 survivors who would be willing to donate some of their blood, which would then be screened for potentially useful antibodies.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/04/researchers-may-have-found-coronavirus-achilles-heel/

4 Things to Know About Funerals and Costs During the Coronavirus Crisis

Funeral planning and funeral services have been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic, adding stress at a time when many who are grieving are also struggling with their finances and an uncertain future.

While funeral homes have adopted guidelines from health-care professionals and officials to keep themselves and grieving families and friends safe during the pandemic, consumers should expect a number of changes and be aware of their rights.
“It’s certainly affecting the way people make their decisions on what they’re going to do and how they’re going to memorialize their loved one,” says Jeffrey Wages, president at Wages & Sons Funeral Homes & Crematories in Lawrenceville, Ga.

Health Considerations

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in recently issued guidelines, says that a funeral or visitation service can be held for a person who has died of the virus, but people should consider not touching the body, and activities such as kissing, washing, and shrouding should be avoided. The rules also suggest that anyone who may be infected or who is experiencing a fever, cough or other symptoms of Covid-19 not attend services.

Embalming can be conducted and burials or cremations can take place in line with any state or local requirements on handling remains of those who have died of certain infectious diseases, the CDC says. Open-casket funerals are still permitted.

Crowd Limits

In addition to CDC health guidelines, many states have issued their own recommendations on crowd sizes. The New York State Department of Health, for example, has recommended that gatherings, including wakes and memorial services, be limited to no more than 50% of the maximum capacity of the funeral home or to 50 individuals, whichever is lower.
The White House, meanwhile, has issued guidelines that people should avoid social gatherings of more than 10 people through the end of April.
To keep gatherings small, many funeral homes are webcasting or livestreaming services for those who cannot attend. Others are rotating small groups of mourners into the home. Some are presenting family members with video recordings of services that they can share with others.

“Maybe a state only allows 10 guests, but with webcasting and Facebook Live, we can broadcast that service so more people can attend,” says Douglas “Dutch” Nie, president of Nie Family Funeral Home and Cremation Service in Ann Arbor, Mich. “We have people at the door so guests don’t need to touch the doorknobs, and we do a lot of wiping down between guests.”
The National Funeral Directors Association, where Nie is spokesman, has information on how to handle visitations and funerals during the crisis on its website.

Delaying Services

Some families are holding burials or cremation services with only immediate family members, then planning a memorial service for a later date, such as the deceased’s birthday. Nie, for instance, says he has several such memorial services planned for later in the year, the latest one set for August.
In some cases, embalmed bodies can be held in climate-controlled rooms until a traditional burial may be held. Wieting Family Funeral Home in Chilton, Wisc., is now holding some embalmed bodies so that family members can have the type of services they want later in the year, says funeral director Jamie Wieting. She isn’t certain how long the bodies can be held, but in the past, the home has held bodies for as long as three months after death before burial, she says.

Remain Vigilant on Costs

The “Funeral Rule,” which is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, gives consumers the right to buy only the goods and services that they want, and consumers shouldn’t allow themselves to be coerced into buying a package that they don’t want, says Patti Poss, a senior attorney with the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. In addition, the rule ensures their right to buy separate items, like caskets or urns, and services, such as embalming, from a third party and bring them to the funeral home.
Consumers also have the right to obtain pricing information on funeral goods and services over the telephone. The FTC offers a guide on shopping for funeral services on its website, which includes a checklist of funeral goods and services for which consumers may want to compare costs.

The Funeral Consumers Alliance, a nonprofit group that monitors the funeral industry, offers information on shopping around for a funeral, one’s legal rights when planning a funeral and planning a funeral during the pandemic on its website.
“If we need to work with people on price, we’re going to do that,” says Adam Martin, president of Martin Funeral, Cremation & Tribute Services, which operates several funeral homes in mid-Michigan.

One final warning: While Poss said she isn’t aware of any funeral-related scams targeting families affected by the coronavirus, it pays to be on guard because scammers often try to take advantage of disasters like the pandemic.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/four-things-to-know-about-funerals-and-costs-during-the-coronavirus-crisis-51586005202

Hospital Admits Surge, Ventilator Making Ramps, but Not Soon Enough

Intensified manufacturing efforts aren’t moving fast enough to meet the rising U.S. need for ventilators that can keep critical coronavirus patients breathing, hospital and medical-device company officials say.
A frantic global effort is under way to manufacture more of the breathing machines. Traditional ventilator makers including Medtronic PLC and Hamilton Medical AG are more than doubling their weekly output. New entrants Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. have promised a few thousand ventilators as early as this month before sharply ramping up manufacturing.
The federal government has also taken steps to find and distribute ventilators, shipping ventilators from its strategic stockpile and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Yet the reinforcements aren’t likely to arrive soon enough and in sufficient numbers for U.S. hospitals confronting a surge of cases or gearing up for the next wave, hospital and medical-device industry officials say.
Hospitals in the U.S., which have about 60,000 ventilators on hand, will be about 25,000 short of what they need when the surge in coronavirus patients peaks around the middle of this month, estimated Neil Carpenter, who consults for hospitals at Array Advisors.
“I really need them now,” said Chris Van Gorder, chief executive of Scripps Health, which operates five hospitals in San Diego County, Calif.
Scripps placed a roughly $1 million order for 30 ventilators in early March, Mr. Van Gorder said. Yet delivery is scheduled in eight to 10 weeks, which is likely too late, Mr. Van Gorder said. Without the new orders, doctors are preparing to use one ventilator for two patients.
Scripps also hopes to secure more ventilators from San Diego County, which placed its own order. The county hasn’t yet received a delivery date, according to its procurement office.
Hospitals outside the U.S. are also struggling with an insufficient number of ventilators on hand and being delivered.
Ventilators, complicated machines often the size of a desktop printer, have emerged as a crucial weapon in hospital coronavirus treatment. They are used to aid critically ill coronavirus patients, whose infections have all but overwhelmed their lungs and choked off breathing. Many don’t survive even after being hooked up to one.
Hospitals, which typically use the devices on premature babies and pneumonia patients, didn’t have enough of the machines to cope with the influx of coronavirus patients. As their demand jumped, facilities said they searched frantically for ventilators to fill mounting needs.
Northwell Health, in New York City and the surrounding region, is converting up to roughly 270 anesthesia machines and outfitting about 350 other devices with 3-D printed parts so they can function as ventilators, a spokesman said. It is waiting on an order for more than 500 ventilators placed weeks ago to be totally fulfilled, said Phyllis McCready, who oversees the health system’s supply chain.
On Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order allowing the National Guard to take ventilators from hospitals in areas of the state that don’t have a lot of cases, and redistribute to hospitals in need.
Manufacturers are ratcheting up production. Yet companies say it takes time to move employees around, add production lines and arrange a supply chain for the hundreds of components in each machine.
Altogether, medical-device manufacturers are making on average 2,000 to 3,000 ventilators per week, compared with 700 per week before the crisis, said the Advanced Medical Technology Association industry group. It expects production to increase to 5,000 to 7,000 ventilators a week in the coming weeks.
“We could double or triple capacity and still not be able to meet global demand,” said Eric Honroth, head of North America for Getinge AB, a Sweden-based maker of ventilators that is moving to increase production by 60% to make 16,000 ventilators this year.
General Motors is working with ventilator maker Ventec Life Systems to make 10,000 machines a month, and possibly up to 20,000, but it would take till late spring or summer to reach full capacity.
General Electric recruited about 100 current employees and retirees in the region to raise production at its Madison, Wis., plant. It has been training the new plant workers before giving them jobs like quality inspection, material handling or filling a spot on the manufacturing line.
Medtronic, which is transferring employees from a pacemaker plant to its nearby ventilator factory in Galway, Ireland, plans to double production by the end of this month and make an estimated 30,000 ventilators in the next six months, said Bob White, head of the company’s minimally invasive therapies unit.
The company also took the unusual step of sharing online the designs for one of its ventilator models, so other companies could make the model. By Thursday, the designs had been downloaded more than 84,000 times, a spokeswoman said, though the company wasn’t aware of any firm plans by others to make the machines.
Florida-based hospital operator AdventHealth, which projects the pandemic will peak across its markets in starting in May, is exploring whether it would be able to get excess ventilators from hospitals after they have passed their peak needs, officials at the operator said. Meantime, it struck deals Thursday with three ventilator manufacturers who pledge to deliver equipment starting this month and into May, said Marisa Farabaugh, the system’s supply chain chief.
https://www.marketscreener.com/MEDTRONIC-PLC-20661655/news/Medtronic-As-Coronavirus-Hospitalizations-Surge-Ventilator-Manufacturing-Ramps-Up-but-Not-Soon-En-30316546/