What is a ventilator?
Simply put, a ventilator takes over the body’s breathing process when the disease has caused the lungs to fail. This gives the patient time to fight off the infection and recover.
What role does the ventilator play in the treatment of pneumonia?
The ventilator uses “positive pressure” to blow air into the lungs through a tube inserted into the patient’s nose or mouth and moved down into the airway. Longer-term ventilation can involve the tube being introduced through the windpipe. Patients generally exhale on their own, but sometimes the ventilator helps with that as well. What they do in essence, is provide life support -and buy time for patients.
The ventilator also has a humidifier, which adds heat and moisture to the air supply so it matches the patient’s body temperature. Patients are given medication to relax the respiratory muscles so their breathing can be fully regulated by the machine.
Why is the ventilator related to the survival of the patient?
This year, a sudden virus threatens the lives of most people. For the treatment of coronavirus, a ventilator is an essential machine.
Day by day, as the number of coronavirus deaths soars, we see more clearly that many of us will not survive this storm. In the most serious cases, breathing becomes so labored that ventilators have to be used to keep patients alive.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says 80% of patients with coronavirus have mild symptoms and do not need to be hospitalized, but one in every six people will have severe symptoms and difficulty breathing. If this step is reached, it indicates that the virus has caused damage to the lungs. At this time, the human immune system sensed the virus intrusion and started to circumvent the virus. During this process, the body’s blood vessels expand to allow more immune cells to enter the bloodstream. But at the same time, it also allows fluid to enter the lungs, causing difficulty in breathing and causing the body’s oxygen content to drop.
In these severe cases, the virus causes damage to the lungs, causing the body’s oxygen levels to drop and making it harder to breathe. To alleviate this, a ventilator is used to push air, with increased levels of oxygen, into the lungs.
