Canada’s ventilator supply soared to 27,000 during COVID-19 pandemic

Public Services and Procurement Canada said the total cost of more than 27,000 ventilators Canada stockpiled was over $807 million.

Canada’s race to procure ventilators for COVID-19 patients in the early days of the pandemic had researchers, scientists, industry and a notable astrophysicist working “night and day” to design machines that could be quickly manufactured domestically.

Various efforts included a Montreal-based competition that drew global competitors and a group of scientists and engineers involving Queen’s University professor emeritus Art McDonald, co-winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics.

McDonald said Cristiano Galbiati, a colleague and physics professor at Princeton University and an institute in Italy, contacted him from Milan during lockdowns in early 2020 to say the technology they had developed to detect dark matter could be adapted to produce a low-cost ventilator.

At the time, some countries were scrambling to get more ventilators, which pump oxygen through a tube in the windpipe and into the lungs of patients to help them breathe.

There were also fears about doctors having to decide which patients would be prioritized for scarce ventilators.

But months into the pandemic, they were learning ventilators were not always the best option, especially for elderly patients with chronic conditions. A dramatic drop in use of the machines occurred when vaccines became available, starting in mid-December 2020.

Still, by fall 2020 thousands of ventilators were set to be manufactured in response to multiple contracts that were awarded by the federal government in the spring. And while procurement is an essential part of emergency preparedness, some wonder if more effort instead should have been spent addressing what they consider a weakness in our health-care system _ that of staffing and space.

Public Services and Procurement Canada said the total cost of more than 27,000 ventilators Canada stockpiled was over $807 million, including $82.5 million for the Mechanical Ventilator Milano (MVM), designed by McDonald’s group.