The Global Ventilator Race
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The coronavirus outbreak revealed an international shortage of ventilators. Across the world, govenrments scrambled to acquire new ones, not just from traditional manufacturers, but from anyone who though they could design a simple yet functional device. As a result, hundreds of teams and individuals have risen to the challenge, including university students and hobbyists. Jolyon Jenkins set out to design and build a ventilator himself, drawing on the wealth of shared informationi and designs that have emerged in the last few weeks. He soon discovers that it's harder than it looks.
Much publicity has gone to organisations that have produced ventilators that are not up to standard. And as knowledge of the disease has progressed, it's become clear that coronavirus patients need very careful and specialised forms of ventilation if it's not to do more harm than good. So are non-specialists capable of producing machines that will actually benefit patients?
Presenter/producer: Jolyon Jenkins
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:35.0 | BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:39.0 | Hi, I'm Riana Dillon and this is seriously. |
| 0:44.0 | In the middle of March, a week before the lockdown started, |
| 0:52.0 | the Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced what he called a call to manufacturers |
| 0:56.9 | to transform their production lines to make ventilators. If you produce a ventilator, he said, we will buy it. |
| 1:05.0 | It looked very likely that the country was going to run out of ventilators. |
| 1:09.0 | I woke in the night and I thought, what if my family needs one, but've all gone and then how hard can it be to make a ventilator |
| 1:16.7 | surely it's just something that pushes air into the lungs |
| 1:21.8 | I've got an air compressor I I've got a snorkel mask, some garden hose. Can't be too hard. |
| 1:29.7 | When I started to look at it again a couple of weeks later it turned out that a lot of people |
| 1:33.8 | have been having the same thoughts for example Dr Tom Burton a senior systems |
| 1:38.7 | engineer at McLaren applied this is designed to be made in any shed or workshop around the world. |
| 1:45.0 | It's just something I've put together in the basement where a few bits of wood and a |
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