The Healthcare System and the Hospital

Personal Protective Equipment: PPE

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All emergency department and hospital staff who care for patients infected or potentially infected with COVID-19 should have adequate personal protective equipment including N95 masks or PAPR, gloves, face and eye masks, and gowns.

• • Gloves

  • Goans 

  • Masks

Hospital Resources:

Keeping the Coronavirus from Infecting Health-Care Workers

What Singapore’s and Hong Kong’s success is teaching us about the pandemic.

• • Staff: Full-body protective gear, including goggles, complete head coverings, N95 particle-filtering masks, and hazmat-style suits.

    • Clinicians

    • Nurses

    • Respiratory 

Ventilators: Help patients breathe and can be the difference between life and death for those facing the most dire respiratory effects of the coronavirus.

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Mechanical ventilators, which help patients breathe or breathe for them, are considered critical to the nation’s effort to contain the worst effects of the pandemic and avoid a crisis like the one Italy is facing.

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• Hospitals confront potential shortage of ventilators to treat patients with coronavirus

• More lifesaving ventilators are available. Hospitals can’t afford them.

“hospitals are holding back from ordering more medical ventilators because of the high cost for what may be only a short-term spike in demand from the coronavirus epidemic, supply chain experts and health researchers say, intensifying an anticipated shortage of lifesaving equipment for patients who become critically ill.”

• Who gets a ventilator? Hospitals facing coronavirus surge are preparing for life-or-death decisions NBC News (3/18)

“amid growing fears that the United States could face a shortage of ventilators for coronavirus patients, state officials and hospitals are quietly preparing to make excruciating decisions about how they would ration lifesaving care.” 

• We need more ventilators. Here’s what it will take to get them. (MIT Technology Review) As a Stanford postdoc a decade ago, Matt Callaghan created the designs for a streamlined, low-cost ventilator that hospitals could stockpile, to prepare for the possibility of a global pandemic.