Nigerian auto manufacturer Innoson said on Monday that it was ready to
convert its assembly lines to start producing critical medical equipment
that may be in short supply as the country battles the coronavirus
pandemic.
A shortage of ventilators and other critical equipment
has become a growing concern amidst rising cases of COVID-19 across the
world.
“Innoson Motors is ready to assist the government in any
way we can, including the likability of converting out lines to produce
ventilators and other equipment,” Cornel Osigwe, the company’s
spokesperson, told PREMIUM TIMES on Monday, citing his discussion with
Innocent Chukwuma, the group’s chairman, on the matter.
“But we
need the government or other health institutions to place orders the
quantity that may be required before we could take any step,” Mr Osigwe
added.
With its disclosure to PREMIUM TIMES, Innoson has joined a
growing list of automobile companies who expressed intention to
repurpose their manufacturing plants to produce medical equipment across
the world.
General Motors and Rolls Royce, major vehicle
manufacturers in the United States and United Kingdom, respectively,
have publicly disclosed that they could produce ventilators and other
equipment.
But while many agreed that it was possible to retool a
vehicle assembly line for production of ventilators, some medical
equipment experts have warned that it might be several months before any
results become useful.
“These are extremely sensitive machines
with not only a lot of hardware, but also a lot of software. If one of
the components does not work correctly, the whole machine shuts down and
cannot be used any more,” Jens Hallek, a medical equipment production
expert at Hamilton Medical, said Tuesday morning, Wired Magazine
reported.
The Washington Post also reported that the U.S.
Department of Defence had warned that it might take more than a year for
carmakers or aerospace factories to start making ventilators.
Nigeria
recorded its first casualty from coronavirus on Monday morning with the
passing of a 67-year-old retired senior official of the state-run NNPC.
The sexagenarian was amongst the 36 infections so far recorded in
Nigeria since the first case was discovered on February 27, about three
months after the virus broke out in China.
Nigeria is widely
believed to be under-testing the number of COVID-19 carriers within its
population. Less than 200 people are believed to have been tested, a
grossly inadequate figure against the country’s nearly 200 million
people.
Officials have admitted shortages of testing equipment,
with many placing significant hope on the arrival of a consignment of
testing kits and personal protective equipment from Chinese billionaire,
Jack Ma.
But there are also concerns that some elderly and other
immunosuppressed patients who may lose the ability to breathe on their
own would not get a ventilator, a computerised unit that pumps air in
and out of the lungs.
It was unclear how many ventilators are
currently available at hospitals across the country, but in 2018 a
medical expert decried as alarming the number of deaths being recorded
in Nigeria due to acute shortage of oxygen machines.
Medical
doctors at four different teaching hospitals told PREMIUM TIMES on
Monday that they could not estimate more than 300 oxygen machines
throughout the country.
“I cannot estimate more than 300
ventilators in Nigeria,” Segun Adeoye, a consultant neurosurgeon, told
PREMIUM TIMES. “And you have to remember that all the ventilators are
probably already occupied by patients suffering other forms of ailments
before coronavirus outbreak.”
Mr Adeoye said Nigeria would be
better off preventing large scale infection amongst the citizens because
the requisite medical equipment to support hundreds of patients at once
“are just not there.”
Enefaa Bob-Manual Officials at the federal
ministry of health declined to comment on Nigeria’s ventilator capacity
or whether the government had commenced efforts to acquire the
equipment to support potential demand from the pandemic.
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