Medical ventilators are displayed outside Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center Thursday, March 19, 2020. The hospital has 120 ICU ventilators as well as transport ventilators and other machines that can be used as ventilators, said Rob Smith II, associate chief medical officer at Sunrise Hospital.
Tuesday, May 5, 2020 | 2 a.m.
Fifty ventilators loaned to Nevada hospitals to assist in the treatment of coronavirus-infected patients here have been returned to the state of California, Gov. Steve Sisolak said.
With fewer than 720 ventilators available statewide at acute-care and critical-care hospitals, such as University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Sisolak and his medical advisers in mid-March worried about the ability to properly care for a surge in critically ill Nevadans suffering from COVID-19. The machines, which assist people who can no longer breathe on their own, offer one of the most-used treatments for critically ill COVID-19 patients, in addition to other ailments.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose state had around 11,000 ventilators, shipped 500 ventilators to the federal stockpile on loan for use across the United States. The machines were divided among Nevada, Delaware, Maryland and Washington, D.C., as well as the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam.
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In returning the 50 ventilators May 1, along with a note of appreciation to Newsom, Sisolak said he was hopeful Nevada had hit a pivotal point.
“We are not hunting for ventilators right now and hopefully we’ll never have to hunt for ventilators again,” he said in an interview Friday with the Sun.
Sisolak said he would continue his daily monitoring of the use of intensive care beds in Nevada during the pandemic, but that the state was in a good place right now with the equipment on hand.
“If we did have another surge, in terms of positives and hospitalizations, right now we’re in OK shape,” the governor said. “Now, hopefully we stay that way; hopefully it continues to go down.”
Nevada has fewer than 5,000 acute-care beds, of which fewer than 700 are intensive care beds. The ventilator shortage has been a worry nationally since the coronavirus began plaguing the nation. There are 200,000 ventilator machines in the country, according to the American Hospital Association, and worst-case projections estimated 960,000 Americans would require mechanical breathing help due to the disease. Additionally, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, there were only enough specialized health care workers to have 135,000 people on ventilators nationwide at a time.
As of May 2, the last day data is available from the state, 32% of ventilators in Nevada were in use, with 68% of ICU rooms occupied. By comparison, 44% of ventilators in the state were in use and 74% of ICU rooms were occupied on April 6.
Hospitals in the state never hit surge capacity, Sisolak said.
Increased testing, experts say, is the only way to truly know if the virus is contained, and work continues toward that end. Jim Murren, the former MGM Resorts International CEO who now heads the state’s public-private COVID-19 Response, Relief and Recovery Task Force, said the task force was starting to shift its focus to testing.
“I look at testing, particularly for a state like Nevada, as an economic imperative to create not only a recovery, but a sustainable recovery and a sustainable economy,” Murren said.
