To face the peak of infections that will occur in the next few days, America sends 200 ventilators to the UK.
US President, Donald Trump said that the UK called to say that she was in desperate need of ventilators ahead of Covid-19 peak: the UK needs 200 ventilators and America will send them all.
- READ MORE: Covid: how to make a surgical mask at home
- READ MORE: Covid: how to make a hand sanitizer at home
Trump sends 200 ventilators to the UK to face Covid
Otherwise, Whitehall has indeed been scrambling to order thousands of the machines, Trump has engaged in public spats with his governors who have complained about ventilators being held in a federal stockpile. But Trump said on Tuesday he was going to have 110,000 delivered in the coming weeks while adding, ‘I don’t think we’ll need them.’
Trump’s dispatch of 200 ventilators comes a day after British defense firm Babcock said it had received a Government order to produce 10,000 ventilators.
The Government had said 30,000 ventilators will be needed for the NHS to cope with the peak of the pandemic. Then Health Secretary Matt Hancock revised this down to 18,000 over the weekend. The ventilators serve to treat patients who are in intensive care, like Boris Johnson in the last two days.
On Sunday, Mr. Hancock warned the UK might not have enough ventilators on hand when the Covid-19 peak hits. The peak estimated to be in around 10 days. Mr. Hancock said that we need to make sure we have more ventilators than there are people who need ventilation. ‘At the moment we have between 9,000 and 10,000 ventilators within the NHS right now and we have the 2,000 spares that are critical care beds with ventilator capacity should people need to come into them and we’re ramping that up. The answer is that our goal, instead of the 30,000, is that we need 18,000 ventilators over the coming two weeks.’
Asked if the country will be below the capacity it needs in a week’s time when the virus is expected to peak, Mr. Hancock said: “we’ve got the demand down because the majority of people are following their social distancing guidelines”. Mr. Hancock added that if we manage to get this to peak within a week to 10 days then the (ventilator) demand will be even lower than the 18,000. “If I could just explain this, because communicating about these sorts of trajectories is really tough, because I want to prepare the NHS for whatever might happen and to make sure that there is always that spare capacity”.
