Gov. Cuomo orders Ambu Bags to combat Ventilator Shortage

Two weeks ago Politichicks published a novel solution to the looming ventilator shortage: manually operated respirators called ambu bags. Now, Governor Cuomo has announced that New York just purchased 3,000 such bags and ordered 4,000 more in a bid to save lives.

UPDATE!! How to solve the issue of #ventilators shortage

American Coronavirus Pandemic By the Numbers https://t.co/9FBRvJCyiG

— ??Susan??Swift?? (@RealSusanSwift) March 14, 2020

New York has become the epicenter of America’s coronavirus battle and is facing a shortage of ventilators for those severely affected by coronavirus. More than 142,000 people in the United States have contracted coronavirus. As of Sunday, the national death toll has reached 2,484. New York currently leads the nation with more than 59,500 of diagnosed cases and more than 960 deaths.

Gov. Cuomo announced on Friday, March 28 that in addition to buying ambu bags, he is considering training the state’s National Guard in how to use them to save lives.

What do we do if we don’t have enough ventilators? Then you use bag valve masks. What is a valve bag mask? This is a bag valve mask.

This is what you do if you have a person that needs a ventilator, and you don’t have a ventilator. The way this works is it’s basically a manual ventilator and someone squeezes the ventilator, the bag, continuously. This looks easy. I guarantee, if you do this for any length of time, you see how difficult it winds up being. This is the alternative if you don’t have the ventilator.

We are actually buying these. We bought about 3,000. We’ve ordered about an additional 4,000 of these bag valve masks.

We’ve even talking about training National Guard people to learn how to operate this device, which is relatively simple to operate, but you need a lot of people to operate this 24 hours a day for each patient, right?

So those are bag valve masks. They’re the alternative to ventilators and short answer is, no thank you. If we have to turn to this device on any large-scale basis that is not an acceptable situation. So we go back to finding the ventilators because we need the ventilators.

In his public statement Governor Cuomo explained: “There’s an old expression, you go to war with what you have, not with what you need. Which is true. When the bell goes off and you have to go to war, you deal with what you have because it’s too late to do the preparation. . . . And each of us has to do our own part to adjust to it. It is a new reality. It’s a shocking new reality. There is no easy answer. We’re all working our way through it, and we all have to figure out a way to get through it.”

Coronavirus figures are drawn from WorldoMeters.com which reports and updates coronavirus cases around the world and in the United States cases daily.