Eyeless on Campus: COVID19 VENTILATORS--California: Faulty Units Stored-Shipped --- LTV-1200 MAINTENANCE SNAFU

Sunday, March 29, 2020

COVID19 VENTILATORS--California: Faulty Units Stored-Shipped --- LTV-1200 MAINTENANCE SNAFU

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   "...a week ago none of us knew anything about ventilators..."

   (The Lab)--- Governor Newsom of California ordered a recent shipment of flawed ventilators to be refurbished at a converted fuel-cell plant in Sunnyvale. (ABC) The model number as seen from screengrabs by news agencies is the LTV-1200. At the California respiratory Care Board's website, the following information regarding a similar, if not the same, device can be found;
   "In 2007, the State of California purchased and stockpiled 2,400 "Cardinal Health LTV 1200" ventilators for the purposes of disaster or emergency response." (RCB/CA)
Apparently, many of those devices never left the boxes and the batteries are dead;

   "Newsom said California currently has a little over 4,200 ventilators, but more than a thousand of them don’t work. ..The state of California also needs its own stockpile of ventilators fixed – Newsom said 514 ventilators had not been unboxed since 2011 and their batteries no longer work." (KTVU)

   "At the beginning of the pandemic, California had about 7,500 ventilators across the state’s hospital systems and aimed to get another 10,000 ventilators, according to the press release." (Time)

   "More than 500 of these ventilators are from the state Department of Public Health, according to Newsom, and they hadn’t been out of the box since 2011. Even the batteries didn’t work, the governor said. " (CAPradio)

   Not only did the units sent to the state from the Strategic National Stockpile not work, the ones stored locally appeared to have also not been properly maintained. It is no wonder the governor doesn't want to engage in "finger-pointing" as the state is equally guilty of neglect over maintenance.

   Chapter 5 of the Cardinal Health service manual for model LTV-1200 offers strict guidelines on the proper maintenance of the unit;
   "While in storage, every two months -- Recharge the internal battery by plugging the ventilator into an AC power source for 24 hours" (Page 5-1)
In addition, the maintenance procedure also calls for replacement of the battery after a given period. Other requirements demand servicing done by a trained technician certified by Pulmonetic Systems, Inc. What did the Bloom Energy CEO have to say about his technicians' qualifications for servicing the LTV-1200s?
   " 'Hopefully, what we're doing here is to say, we can do this, a week ago none of us knew anything about ventilators other than what they're used for,' said Bloom CEO K.R. Sridhar." (ABC)

Sources
RCB/CA, https://www.rcb.ca.gov/licensees/disaster_response.shtml
Bloom Energy,
https://abc7news.com/society/silicon-valley-energy-company-refurbishes-ventilators-for-ca-during-covid-19-crisis/6059357/
Don't Work,
https://www.ktvu.com/news/gov-newsom-mayor-liccardo-tour-sunnyvale-company-refurbishing-ventilators
Total #, https://time.com/5812147/california-coronavirus-broken-ventilators/
Dead Batteries, http://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/03/28/california-wants-10000-more-ventilators-for-hospitals-its-almost-halfway-and-companies-are-reinventing-themselves-to-help/
LTV-1200 Training Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEjjLNzOKQ0
Cardinal Health LTV 1200 Service Manual, http://www.usmed-equip.com/content/datesheet/pdfs/Pulmonetic%20LTV%201200-1150%20Service%20Manual%20Rev%20E.pdf
Cardinal Health, https://www.indemed.com/Catalog/searchresults.cfm?keyword=ltv+1200&source=header

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