The New Orleans region is facing a potentially life-threatening situation, according to current projections, of running out of ventilators sometime this weekend.
Governor Edwards says they’re currently scouring the medical community trying to figure out where they might have ventilators that are not in need, even if they aren’t high-powered ICU models.
“We are trying to get those devices to our tier-one hospitals to augment what we are trying to do. Now, they are not ideal, but they are better than not having a ventilator at all,” says Edwards.
490 COVID-19 patients are on ventilators in Louisiana as of the noon 04-01-2020 update.
The state will be receiving about 150 ventilators from the feds today, but that number has already been factored into models warning of a shortage this weekend. The good news is these models are some of the best the state can get according to Edwards.
“The types of ventilators that we are getting from the strategic national stockpile, those 150, they are top of the line ventilators you would expect to see in an ICU,” says Edwards.
When you combine requests to the feds and private companies, Louisiana has requested 14,000 ventilators total, but Edwards says that doesn’t mean 14,000 people are projected to need them.
“We have an idea of how many ventilators that we need across the state, and it is in the several thousands. We have ordered more than that because you never know which vendor is going to get a supply to send you at any given time,” says Edwards.
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