Covid 19 and Shortage of Ventilators in India

Narayana Health has been actively supporting the Government in a bid to control and address the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty has been advising the State Health Authorities on the need to create a separate COVID hospital and the same has been taken up. Herein, in terms of infrastructure, there is a critical need for ventilators in many states. There is a global shortfall in the number of ventilators because most western countries that produce them have stockpiled close to a few million. China is the only other major producer and they used most of their manufacturing capacity to manage local demand. India is critically short of ventilators – we will need close to 2.1 ventilators for every 10,000 adults (around 100,000) to manage this pandemic. Currently, as per rough estimates, India has around 40,000 ventilators. The Union health ministry’s data shows there are only 8,432 ventilators in the public sector in India. As per recent estimates , the ventilator demand in India could be around a million ventilators.

There is only 1 Indian company called Skanray that has an integrated manufacturing supply chain for producing ventilators. Each basic machine will cost around INR 500,000 plus 12%GST taxes and we will procure as many as we can from them. Narayana Hrudayalaya is working with the government of Karnataka, West Bengal, New Delhi, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh and Assam to convert existing government hospitals into an exclusive COVID treatment hospital. We will help them procure 1000 ventilators and are speaking with various philanthropies to enable this program.

1. Figures from other countries indicate that 15-20% require hospitalisation and 5% need intensive care with ventilator support for approximately 2 weeks.
2. If peak loads develop over the next few weeks it would severely stretch existing public health infrastructure.
3. Provision of these ventilators would improve capability of these designated COVID Hospitals to deal with surges in COVID case loads.