Elon’s Ventilators & N95 Masks Can’t Come Quickly Enough
Elon Musk’s ventilators and N95 masks can’t come quickly enough. The other day, I woke up to two news stories, one from The Advocate and one from CleanTechnica. The Advocate reported harrowing news, while CleanTechnica gave us a bit of hope. Here in Louisiana, our doctors and nurses are out of protective gear and fear they are infecting patients. Not to mention themselves. This is why the good news that CleanTechnica reported — Elon’s plans to deliver thousands of ventilators and hundreds of thousands of masks — brings a touch of relief. Hopefully, some of our hospitals can get some of those masks.
I reached out to Elon on Twitter earlier tonight. Things have gotten worse here in my state and hospitals are running out of PPE. One of my friends, a Tesla owner, told me: “About to start a shift day, 7 days in ICU. Can’t stay up and fight anymore today. Please keep doing all you can but I have to sleep now.” This was in response to me trying to figure out, if Elon was going to reply and send us supplies, where they would go.
My friend’s idea was to send them to the New Orleans Tesla Service Center where Tesla owners could help distribute them. Cole Davis is one who would do whatever it takes to help our hospitals here. It was his tweet that I shared with Elon, who replied right before Twitter suspended my account (again). Yes, I am still being targeted by whoever is mass reporting tweets.
Earlier today, our governor just issued a lockdown or stay at home order. We can still go to the grocery store, doctors’ offices, or pick up takeout food, but people should work from home or just not go to work.
I want to quickly take a moment here to personally thank Elon Musk. Being shadow banned, my reply probably didn’t come through, but I mentioned local hospitals here such as Our Lady of the Lake and Baton Rouge General, and shared a link to an article from Nola.com that stressed that our hospitals may be overwhelmed statewide.
I may not be able to help with delivery, as I am still on a doctor-ordered quarantine, but as a writer, I am hoping to help in this way. Our stories are what make us human, after all, and hopefully, the challenges presented by this pandemic can help us see that. If we can find a way to overcome these challenges while helping one another, then we show the truth as to what humanity truly is about. Elon told me once in the midst of some very difficult times to believe in good, and what he and man others are doing definitely counts as good.
Many are working to provide more supplies of ventilators, masks, and other equipment. Mary Foster tweeted last week that a large ventilator company in the U.S. says that it can ramp up production by 500%, but the problem is that our own government hasn’t placed any orders.
THIS! 👇 Ventilator manufacturers are ready to ramp production. It is NOT faster to ask other manufacturers to start from scratch. https://t.co/tZeq7y5XWT
— bonnienorman.bsky.social (@bonnienorman) March 19, 2020
The problem, it seems, isn’t that we don’t have a way to make ventilators or masks, but that our own government hasn’t seemed to see the need to have them made. What’s wrong with this picture? While people are angry at Elon, claiming he is just doing this for the fame or large government contracts (a tweet that Mary’s reply was addressing), thousands of doctors and nurses in the U.S. are lacking protective medical gear to keep themselves and their patients safe from spreading diseases — including COVID-19. We shouldn’t have to ask the head of a car manufacturer for help with this.
John Gavin, an ER physician at Amite, Louisiana’s small ER, told The Advocate, “There were just so many people who had so many vague symptoms that any of them could have been that person.” He is referring to someone from whom he contracted the coronavirus. Despite this, he thinks that officials at Hood Memorial Hospital haven’t made any changes to protocols or procedures that would protect doctors and nurses from contracting the new disease.
“I don’t know if they’ve done anything since then. But during that time there was nothing other than advice to wash your hands frequently and ‘we’ll try to keep the water on,’” he says, referring to a water cutoff that had taken place earlier this month. Gavin, who is 69 and in that age range for which the coronavirus is often fatal, said the ER didn’t have gowns or N95 respirator masks designed to protect doctors and nurses from airborne particles and liquids at the time he was working there. “They offered us paper face masks, that’s it,” he said to The Advocate. I remember the same. When I was treated earlier this week at Our Lady of the Lakes, here in Baton Rouge (it was apparently strep and I’m on the mend), I noticed that no one had N95 masks. I had the same masks the doctors and nurses had on.
Elon Musk’s efforts to provide ventilators and N95 masks are great — I applaud him. However, we shouldn’t have to rely on Elon Musk to fix everything our government refuses to fix — especially since Donald Trump spent a long time saying the coronavirus was a hoax. We need other companies, especially those that produce the medical gear, to step up. Just because Trump didn’t ask companies to make them doesn’t mean our hospitals don’t need them. The WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic earlier this month. That should have sounded the alarm well enough for those in the industry, and the federal government (led by Trump) should have known and acted well before that.
If we can’t convince our own government to order medical equipment, we will need more people like Elon Musk to make and ship them. But we shouldn’t have to resort to that.
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