Hyperventilation Nation

I didn't know until yesterday, when I heard it from Andrew Cuomo's lips, that 80% of the patients put on ventilators never recover, which means ventilators really aren't the "life-saving" miracle machines we often read about in recent headlines. That seems to be on the high (meaning pessimistic) side of the percentages I've seen reported, but it's fair to say that patients have a pretty low probability of ever getting off a ventilator once they're on one. 

The machines can be helpful in prolonging life, in other words, giving some percentage of users a fighting chance, but most of the people who use one won't make it. How much more life these machines buy for patients -- how many more days or hours, on average -- I do not know. I'm sure those statistics exist somewhere. But all most of these machines are good for is delaying the inevitable and prolonging suffering for the doomed. Do ventilators lower the overall mortality rate? Not by very much, relative to all the focus they receive. I've also seen reports that ventilators sometimes can do more harm than good; that they themselves can be a conduit for infections that kill; that they may have been OVERUSED as a treatment for COVID19.

None of this argues for not using ventilators in situations where they're helpful, or for withholding this technology from lost causes and just writing them off. But it does point to a disconnect between public perceptions about ventilators and their real-world medical utility in the midst of this crisis. And that misperception could have repercussions, depending on how the politics of this play out.   

So . . . did I have a point? My point, I suppose, or my question, is why all the obsessive focus on ventilators for the past three or four weeks, given that the projected "shortage" was based on bogus models and they have a marginal medical benefit to begin with? Now, just as the curve is being flattened, states that only a few weeks ago were making a federal case out of the lack of ventilators -- like New York -- have MORE than they need and are shipping them out to other hotspots, which will themselves be cooling off by the time the machines arrive.

So were ventilators ever really the issue -- or were they weaponized to advance partisan political agendas that had nothing to do with saving lives? And will the weaponization of ventilators end here? I doubt it. Democrats will next be making a scandal out of what we paid for this tidal wave of surplus ventilators, even as the need for them steeply declined and their utility as "life-savers" came into question. They'll then begin blaming Trump for browbeating companies into overproducing them, after having blamed Trump for the alleged ventilator shortage.

No matter where the Coronavirus crisis takes us from here, "Ventilatorgate" already has proven, once and for all, that this country is certifiable insane. Let's do what we can to fix the bodies. That's the top priority. But what we can do to fix our sick and broken "body politic" is a much more daunting question.