COVID-19: UK manufacturers collaborate to produce 30,000 ventilators

British manufacturers are facing one of the biggest challenges in their lives as they try to make over 30,000 ventilators this month. As the UK continues to battle coronavirus, specialist firms have collaborated with industrial giants like Airbus and Rolls Royce to produce medical ventilators that would cover the shortage of the device in Hospitals.

Johnson urges to make 30,000 devices

This comes as country’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in a conference call urged companies to make 30,000 devices within weeks. Since then scores of companies have joined hands to share resources and expertise to meet the target that PM has assigned. The department of health and social care has still not stated the number of patients who would need ventilators at once. However, the country’s Health Minister Matt Hancock on April 3 said that the peak of COVID-19 cases would arrive sooner than expected, perhaps by Easter.

According to an industry insider, it was already looking like a tall order warning that while the industry has already moved mountains to get to where it has, it is going to be “nowhere near” the target by mid-April, international media reported. The sheer scale of the challenge is the reason the government has placed the order of nearly double the number required.

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According to reports, the NHS already has 8,175 ventilators and can requisition more than 1,000 from the private sector. Some 8,000 have been ordered for import but no delivery dates have been revealed. In addition to this, Ventilator challenge UK, a consortium including more than a thousand of engineering firms has an order of 15,00o ventilators. According to reports, it is expected to deliver 30 by the end of this week.

All the firms are working on specific prototypes, variations or existing designs that have yet to receive an approval from the country’s Medicine and Healthcare products regulatory agency. If everything goes as leaders have planned, the country would have more than the lifesaving devices than it requires. However, this comes with the huge risk that they might arrive after the need is greatest. The coronavirus pandemic has infected 41,903 and killed 4,313 people across the British territory.

Image: AP

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