Canada’s hospitals and health officials are looking at ways to boost the number of available ventilators to prepare for a deluge of very sick COVID-19 patients amid projections that they could run out of such life-saving equipment within weeks.
Canada’s hospitals and health officials are looking at ways to boost the number of available ventilators to prepare for a deluge of very sick COVID-19 patients amid projections that they could run out of such life-saving equipment within weeks.
While most people who get COVID-19 only face mild symptoms, the sickest end up in intensive care units and must be attached to ventilators in order to survive and recover.
A new study shows Canada’s most populated province, Ontario, could run out of ventilators quickly if the trajectory of the pandemic is similar to that in Italy. There, the coronavirus epidemic has already overwhelmed the health-care system, forcing doctors to make hard choices about which patients get access to life-saving resources such as intensive care beds and ventilators.
Ontario has implemented school and restaurant closures and is encouraging social distancing among residents in an effort to stop that from happening, notes Beata Sander, a scientist who has been modelling the potential impact of the pandemic on the province’s health-care system.
“What our modelling is showing is that if we cannot keep these interventions in place … we’re going to run out of capacity really, really quickly — likely in the next two weeks, Sander said.
Sander is a University Health Network Scientist and an associate professor at the Institute of