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

Dummy on a ventilator
(Image credit: Axel Heimken/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)

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."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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."

Explore More
Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.