The High-Stakes Race to Build More Ventilators

The High-Stakes Race to Build More Ventilators

Along the way, [Kevin] Zagorski and his colleagues took direction from the Bridge Ventilator Consortium, an ad hoc group of doctors and engineers based at UC Irvine and the University of Texas Austin. The consortium coined the term “bridge ventilator,” for a simple device with fewer capabilities than the more complex machines typically used in hospitals, but good enough for many patients with relatively mild issues, including some Covid-19 patients. “Not everyone needs the Cadillac,” says Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at the UC Irvine Medical Center.