Beijing Aeonmed Co. just east of China’s capital has been working three shifts, around the clock to producing ventilators to try and meet demands from the coronavirus outbreak.
The company has orders from all over the world in desperate need of lifesaving ventilators. Director of Beijing Aeonmed, Li Kai recently said:
There’s literally no country in the world that doesn’t want to buy a ventilator from China right now. We have tens of thousands of orders waiting. The issue is how fast we can make them.
This statement shows just how much the virus has affected the world, especially healthcare facilities, to try and fight this deadly virus.
The global death toll has passed 40,000 and in cities like New York and Milan that are the hardest hit, they need these ventilators as quickly as they can. For COVID-19 patients with severe cases of the disease, receiving treatment from a ventilator can give their blood the extra oxygen essential for survival.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently estimated the state may need up to 30,000 ventilators. At the time of his statement, they only had 5,000-6,000 available. Cuomo told reporters:
It’s ventilators, ventilators, ventilators, that is the greatest need. The state has people in China shopping for ventilators.
Wu Chuanpu is the director of Vedeng.com, one of China’s main platforms for connecting medical equipment suppliers and buyers. Wu said: “All the ventilator factories in China have reached their maximum capacity, occupied fully by foreign demand.”
According to Wu, the factories in China are receiving more than 60 to 70 new orders every day. Many of which are orders for hundreds or even thousands of ventilator machines. This is enough to keep the factories producing at full capacity until May.
In the U.S. alone, the Society of Critical Care Medicine estimates that 960,000 patients will require ventilator support due to the COVID-19 outbreak. However, the country has less than 300,000 ventilator machines.
In Italy where they have a high number of deaths from the virus, the ventilator shortage has been forcing doctors to triage patients.
Due to the extreme shortage around the world, Donald Trump gave the green light to auto manufacturers to reconfigure their plants so they can begin ventilator manufacturing.
The problem faced with ventilators is they are not easy to make like face masks, according to Wu, this makes rapid production of the product difficult. “The expansion of the production line is very time-consuming and resource-intensive,” said Wu. It also involves personnel training. It is too cumbersome
Ventilators in such high numbers are not normally needed by hospitals, as they normally only carry a few dozen for critical patients in intensive care units. Now, with the coronavirus outbreak affecting peoples’ lungs, increasing blood oxygen levels gives the patient a much better chance at survival.
