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Dr. Bryan James, head of the Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at Bustamante Hospital for Children
A local medical practitioner disagrees with some doctors who are worried that ventilators could be harming certain coronavirus patients.
Some hospitals in the US have reported unusually high death rates for coronavirus patients on ventilators.
Ventilators are machines that force air into the lungs of persons who cannot breathe on their own because of severe pneumonia or acute respiratory distress.
Dr. Bryan James, head of the Department of Anaesthesia and Intensive Care at Bustamante Hospital for Children, said this could be related to how sick the patient is at the point when they are placed on the ventilator.
"When people go on the ventilator, the results are really, really bad. But it doesn't mean that the ventilator is killing people. What it actually means is that by the time where you get to the point where you need to go on the ventilator, you have a sort of in the region of eight out of ten chance of dying. So the ventilator, as the results go now, is only saving maybe about two out of ten persons who go on it," he explained.
He was speaking Sunday on Radio Jamaica's weekly news review programme That's a Rap.
State officials in New York City reported that more than 80 per cent of coronavirus patients placed on ventilators died.
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