Doctors are sharing 3D-printed ventilator splitter designs to prepare for the crunch

Facing acute shortages of ventilators to treat a tsunami of COVID-19 patients, doctors and engineers are improvising, and one relatively easy, inexpensive, and slightly risky workaround is a splitter that allows multiple patients to use one ventilator.

"If you do the math, there was no way that any hospital or any hospital in any country in the world would be able to manage the critically ill patients," Dr. Saud Anwar, a pulmonary critical care specialist and state senator in Connecticut, tells NBC 4 New York. So he worked with a 3D print shop owner and an engineer to create an open-source splitter that allows one machine to treat up to seven patients. They aren't the only ones with that idea. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration allowed the use of splitters to treat more than one COVID-19 patient on an emergency basis.

A team of engineers at Johns Hopkins University, a doctor-and-engineer couple in South Carolina, and anesthesiology and intensive care staff at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center have also developed their own 3D-printed splitters. "It's not ideal," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said last week, "but we believe it's workable."

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Some experts warn that sharing a ventilator could do more harm than good for patients, potentially even spreading coronavirus infections. But proponents see little choice, given the lack of equipment. "Even when you have one-to-one ventilator, the success rate is very poor, but if there is no ventilator the success rate is zero," Anwar said. "And so that is why it is important to use whatever tool we can create to help out."