While healthcare professionals globally struggle to contain the Covid-19 pandemic, acute care patients are taxing ICU units worldwide. Critical to the care needed for the most serious cases is breathing support through mechanical ventilators. In Italy, the worst-hit nation in Europe, the lack of ventilators has forced physicians to deny life-saving breathing support to patients who could otherwise survive, in a macabre, battlefield-like triage system. Could ventilators be mass produced at lightning speed to prevent this in the United States? Possibly, but to do it will require more than consultation with large manufacturing CEOs like Elon Musk and GM’s Mary Barra.

Here are the key points:

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