A paper published in 2014 documents the invention of a ventilator manifold which can lead to up to 4 people sharing a ventilator.
You can find the paper here and an article describing the invention here.
Does anyone know the regulation that is stopping us from printing these manifolds and reducing the death toll from a local overwhelmed medical system? A lot of people are rightly worried about our ventilator situation. Something that quadruples system capacity would be a godsend.
Update: This is deemed a method of desperation with numerous problems that can lead to worse patient outcomes in this joint statement by six US medical associations. They really don’t like it.
This is not stopping innovators like Prisma Health from developing ways to have multi-user ventilators.
Update 2: New York has approved ventilator splitting as they purchase 7,000 more ventilators. Federal ventilators are also starting to arrive, all 400 of them.