#Ventilatorgate: Mid-May update

I haven't had much time to look into #ventilatorgate in the past couple of weeks, but there was an interesting development last Friday with an update from the Cabinet Office. On this update we found out that:

1. The UK received 150 ventilators from Sweden in the first week of May, out of an order of 2,000
2. We now have 11,000 ventilators deployed, an increase of 100 since the end of April
3. The Cabinet Office ended support for 5 more new ventilators
4. Ramp for the Penlon Prima ES02 is set to ramp up in the 'next few weeks'

This is a quite detailed and important update by the Government. For me it is key and worrisome that the much vaunted Penlon Prima ES02 ramp is yet to occur. Looking at the absolute numbers it is evident they have not been able to produce at scale yet as the total number of ventilators available is essentially flat.

We're two months into the vaunted Ventilator Challenge and haven't even been able to hit 2/3 of the 18,000 target set for April 20th. We were lucky that fewer people needed invasive ventilation than anticipated back in March.

And as of mid-May there is a grand total of zero new design ventilators approved by the MHRA, under production and deployed. This shows the lunacy of that approach taken.