Grim Thoughts

Who should get the few mechanical respirators that can mean the difference between life and death?

Why should you care about ventilators? Lets do the sum based on
How likely something is (In the next 50 years say)
How bad it is
How much you can do about it

So to take large meteorite strike of earth
Not very likely in the next 50 years
Massively bad
Not much. Ask that your tax money goes into investigating it is about all.

Take a bad car crash
Pretty likely
400 people a year in Ireland so not likely to wipe out society
Lots. Seat belts, speed limit, don’t drink and drive

Influenza Pandemic

Very likely
Very bad. !918 had over 50 million deaths.
A bit. At a personal level live healthy and maybe stock up on face masks. Ask that your tax money goes into investigating it. And I believe you can make real research steps.

Can you make a respirator to keep people breathing? Can you train up to care for people on respirators from your current skill set. Can you access medical records on the last influenza pandemic to help assess the general power of certain cures?

By this I mean that in the 1918 epidemic Americans found

Only one therapeutic measure, transfusing blood from recovered patients to new victims, showed any hint of success.

George Whipple
Did any researchers from other countries confirm this result?

It could be that ventilators are not the choke point in delivering care in an influenza pandemic the choke point could be something you know about. So think about it and see if there is anything you can do.