State health officials are in talks with a number of companies to purchase 1,500 ventilators after a failed multi-state effort to buy a much larger supply.

Gov. Tony Evers announced at the end of March he would attempt to purchase 10,000 ventilators, which are used to pump oxygen into the lungs of the sickest coronavirus patients.

That effort involved a combined bid with leaders from Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan. But worldwide demand for ventilators made it difficult to place a large order, state officials explained.

"We were trying to be creative and do some bulk purchasing across state lines to get higher in the queue," Department of Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm told reporters Monday. "Ultimately that order fell through, the contract was not signed, which is why we pivoted to trying to place this order as a single state."

Palm said Monday she believed the company that the state will purchase from was vehicle manufacturer General Motors, which is on the hook to deliver 30,000 ventilators to the nation's Strategic National Stockpile by the end of August, according to the Detroit Free Press.

A DHS spokesperson later clarified that because of the high level of competition, the state is pursuing a number of sources for the purchase, and not all 1,500 machines would necessarily come from one company.

Palm said Monday she thought the shipment would give Wisconsin a small number of ventilators soon, but that the bulk would come later due to national demand.

The bid for ventilators comes at a time when nearly every state is in the same market, a situation that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said forces states to compete against each other for supplies.

Gov. Tony Evers echoed the sentiment Monday, saying if the federal government would have used its purchasing power, the situation would be easier to navigate than 50 states trying to buy the machines individually.

"It's difficult to compete against bigger states and, frankly, states that have enormous needs," Evers said.

A Wisconsin Hospital Association dashboard released last week showed Tuesday morning that the state's hospitals had 1,229 of the machines on hand. About three in 10 were currently in use.

Officials have not yet said how many ventilators they think will be needed to weather the worst of COVID-19 in Wisconsin, but have said they're planning in case of a surge in weeks to come.

"Our goal is to plan for the worst and do everything we can to prevent that from happening," Palm told reporters Friday.

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It's not yet clear whether, if the state has yet to reach its peak in cases, the number of patients needing a ventilator will exceed the number of machines available.

As states rush to calculate how many of the ventilators they've got in the bank and how many more they might need, data from elsewhere is showing that the majority of people placed on ventilators during the pandemic didn't recover.

Dennis Carroll, who led the U.S. Agency for International Development's infectious disease unit for more than a decade, told USA TODAY perhaps one-third of COVID-19 patients on ventilators survive.

In New York, Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently estimated that only 20% of those placed on ventilators would ever come off, and in Italy, physicians observing a group of the critically ill reported that only 16% of the patients on ventilators had been discharged from the ICU over a five-week observation period.

Despite those dismal statistics, the machines do save lives, said Norman Fost, a UW-Madison bioethics professor.

“We wouldn’t be talking about allocating ventilators if we didn’t think they had some prospect of saving lives,” he said.

In case Wisconsin has to ration ventilators, a committee out of Madison has provided recommendations about how to make those decisions. Fost, who chaired the committee, said there are a number of factors to consider.

“You want to have guidelines that are fair where people aren’t discriminated against,” he said. “The first thing you want to know is whether the patient can survive this illness. You want to make sure they have some prospect of surviving.”

Fost said it’s also important that a single physician isn’t responsible for deciding which patients should receive the potentially life-saving equipment. The decision should fall to a committee of at least two to four people in a position to act swiftly, he said.

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Raquel Rutledge of the Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.

Contact Madeline Heim at 920-996-7266 or mheim@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @madeline_heim.