University of Cal COVID-19: UC researchers seeking spare PAP machines

[Dormeo]

Researchers from the Mechanical Engineering department at UC Berkeley and from UC San Francisco (a medical school) are collaborating to outfit PAP machines so that they can be used as ventilators. The faculty leads are Grace O'Connell (UCB, ME) and Bertram Lubin, associate dean of Children's Health, UCSF. The web site is very rudimentary, but you'll find at least some information at the link below. They are seeking donations of PAP machines that people aren't using, more here:

https://www.helpventilator.com/

[Dormeo]

Bump, and more information now here:

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco...apnea.html

[Big Guy]

Costs $4.00 to read the link. 

[SuperSleeper]

Researchers from the Mechanical Engineering department at UC Berkeley and from UC San Francisco (a medical school) are collaborating to outfit PAP machines so that they can be used as ventilators. The faculty leads are Grace O'Connell (UCB, ME) and Bertram Lubin, associate dean of Children's Health, UCSF. The web site is very rudimentary, but you'll find at least some information at the link below. They are seeking donations of PAP machines that people aren't using, more here:

https://www.helpventilator.com/

Dormeo, I'm getting a "404 ERROR" when I try to go to that site.  Anyone else getting that?

Either they're working on the website or it's been taken down for some reason. 

Interesting that when I searched Google for "helpventilator.com" and then looked at an old cached page, it's got the exact same content & graphics as the site at:  "ventilatorsos.com".

Wondering what's going on here?  Both of them have domains registration info hidden with a paid private registration for some reason, which prevents people from seeing the actual organization behind the domain. (you can check this by using a public WHOIS tool).   If you know of any folks at this organization and it's legit, you may want to tell them that to expect trust, they really need to make the domain registration info public with a working email contact & mailing address instead of hiding it, which makes it look "shady".

The contact email in the cached version of helpventilator.com is sunx.23@berkeley.edu, while the contact info for ventilatorsos.com is ventilatorsos2020@gmail.com.

[Dormeo]

I think it has a paywall that for some reason I can get around. Here’s the text:


By Brian Rinker – Staff Reporter, San Francisco Business Times
10 hours ago
In order to increase the limited supply of ventilators, a group of Bay Area engineers and doctors has developed a technique to repurpose sleep apnea machines to provide oxygen to patients suffering severe respiratory illness brought on by COVID-19. All they need now to get going, according to the group, is government support and sleep apnea machines.

Normally repurposing medical devices to address health conditions they weren’t intended to treat is restricted by regulation, but due to the dire circumstances, the FDA has allowed for the rejiggering of sleep machines into life-saving ventilators.

The group, known as the COVID-19 Ventilator Rapid Response Team, is made up of engineers from UC Berkeley and doctors from UCSF and Mills Peninsula Hospital.

As COVID-19 threatens the lives of thousands, ventilators are needed to keep critical patients alive as the deadly virus can make it impossible to breathe without one. But a nationwide shortage of ventilators prevents hospitals from being able to meet the demand, leaving doctors to triage patients, like what has happened in Italy, Spain and now New York.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has said that California alone needs 10,000 ventilators to meet the demand, but only has a supply of about half that. Other efforts are being made to increase the numbers. Ford, General Electric, Dyson, Tesla and others have turned their production efforts to making ventilators and designing new ones.

The COVID-19 Ventilator Rapid Response Team is asking the government to pick up the project and work with manufacturers to get the repurposed devices to health care workers who need them. They are also seeking donation of sleep apnea machines, known as CPAP and BIPAP, for the community.

“We are hoping for expedited government support because hospitals are quickly getting besieged with COVID-19 patients,” said Dr. Ajay Dharia, pulmonary doctor at Mills Peninsula Hospital, in a statement. “The use of home-based CPAP and BIPAP machines offer such a possible solution, but to become a feasible option this project needs backing from the FDA, manufacturers and the government.”

[OpalRose]

I get the same 404 error.

[Sleeprider]

Here is an alternate link to a similar article https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases...34663.html

[Dormeo]

I pasted the text in my last post.