Pneumonia, Ventilators, and APAP machines

Friend Jeff was pondering in his blog about the usefulness of autopap (APAP) machines as ventilators to combat the shortage of actual ventilators. Doing some digging, I find that ventilators are used for people with pneumonia (why you need one with Covid-19) are mostly about pushing enough air with enough oxygen into the lungs to reduce the inflammation so the lungs can drain themselves, basically. This is not the same as how we picture it - when they're used to force air into the lungs of someone whose breathing muscles aren't functioning. Apparently, APAP can do that, at least some of the time. To whit, this article:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3256460/

Food for thought. We may need tens of thousands of ventilators, which might be hard to find, but we may be able to supplement the ones we have with APAP machines, which are considerably more common, and much less expensive.  Heck, even I have an APAP machine.

-JRS