Cuba to have 500 domestic lung ventilators by next October

The first 500 emergency lung ventilators manufactured in Cuba will be ready in October, a step forward in achieving technological autonomy.

Of the total number, 250 units correspond to the invasive variant; therefore, they are attached to the patient by means of intubation and are used in the ICU in the care of serious and critical patients, Mitchell Valdes Sosa, director of the Cuban Neuroscience Center (CNEURO), belonging to the BioCubaFarma Business Group, told Granma newspaper.

The other half of the ventilators do not require the patients to be intubated and are used in less serious cases and are therefore called non-invasive.

The software used and the industrial design used to obtain the equipment are the work of Cuban experts, although for their manufacture in both variants they were based on open codes, published on the Internet by the MIT and University College London.

 In April, the Cuban government was barred from acquiring pulmonary ventilators from the Swiss companies imt Medical ag and Acutronis, because the two entities were bought by the U.S. company Vyaire Medical Inc, which suspended commercial relations with the island due to the blockade.

For this reason, the country's leadership asked the multi-institutional team to try to make a prototype of a ventilator in record time so that no Cuban patient infected with COVID-19 who needed it would be deprived of such an important medical device, guaranteeing assisted respiration, the executive remarked.