UK, US face ventilator crisis
WHO calls for ramping up production and supplies of medical equipment
Britain faces a "massive shortage" of ventilators that will be needed to treat critically ill patients suffering from coronavirus, after it failed to invest enough in intensive care equipment, a leading ventilator manufacturer said yesterday.
The call came as United States appealed for donations of respirator masks to combat a shortage of the lifesaving equipment.
"England is very poorly equipped," said Andreas Wieland, chief executive of Hamilton Medical in Switzerland, which says it is the world's largest ventilator maker.
"They're going to have a massive shortage, once the virus really arrives there," he told Reuters in an interview.
UK health minister Matt Hancock has acknowledged the existing stock of 5,000 ventilators is inadequate.
Ventilators, running in the thousands of dollars per unit, are used to help people with respiratory difficulties to breathe. They are high-tech versions of the "iron lungs" that kept people alive into the 1950s during fierce polio epidemics.
Worldwide, the devices have become shorthand for the rapid advance of the disease -- and the desperation of officials who fear their stocks are inadequate. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the 3,000 devices in his state where 20 people have died are a fraction of what he'd like to have.
"The entire world is trying to buy ventilators," Cuomo said, according to a transcript published on Wednesday, adding he is hoping to tap a US federal government stockpile.
Germany's Draegerwerk last week got a government order for 10,000, equal to a typical year's production.
Wieland's company in the Swiss Alps has boosted normal production of some 15,000 ventilators annually by 30-40% and now can produce about 80 ventilators daily.
Last week, Hamilton Medical shipped 400 ventilators to Italy, whose intensive care units have been overwhelmed by more than 35,000 cases of the rapidly spreading virus and almost 3,000 deaths.
About 50% of those with coronavirus in Italy accepted into intensive care units are dying, compared with typical mortality rates of 12% to 16% in such units.
The World Health Organization called on Wednesday for "order and discipline" in the market for health equipment needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic and said it was in discussions with China and others to ramp up supplies.