At the moment numbers of COVID-19 cases in Australia are growing exponentially. Queensland Health estimates a quarter of us will get infected. The estimated population of Australia is 25,413, 305 on 17 March 2020. Take away a few million, as children are less likely to get infected, then the number infected will be 5 million. Some 10% will need ventilators so some 500,000 ventilators will be needed to keep people alive. This ball park figure does not take into account the reuse of ventilators, but the need will be hundreds of thousands and I suspect the actual supply will be at best 10% of peak demand.
Australia has a huge capability to manufacture ventilators, but it will take co-ordinating across industries to make and supply all the parts. We are world leaders in making electromedical devices (I saw this first hand 40 years ago when I was undertaking a MSc in Medical Physics at QIT. )
An Open Source design is available on Google docs by Julian Botta, a Johns Hopkins Emergency Medicine Resident. More information is available here.
I hope that now that the footy is no longer in the forefront of the minds of our politicians, they can turn to Australian industry to provide the hundreds of thousands of ventilators we will need. Not every industry will have the resources and expertise, but together the first ventilators could be produced in literally days.
The money is there. The Federal Government just gave the airline industry the best part of a billion dollars to waive and refund fuel excise and landing charges. Nice for industry, but for people over 70 who have paid tax all their lives, dying because ventilators are rationed is not acceptable.
There would also be a massive export market, especially to the US.
