MAINGEAR is going to support New York hospitals with affordable, high-quality ventilators built at factories that used to make computers.
New York is in dire straits. The new epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of 9,385 people–more than anywhere else in the US. New York State has 188,694 confirmed cases but until thousands more as testing lags behind the number of people who present symptoms. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has called for as many as 30,000 ventilators in the coming weeks to treat the expected number of patients as the coronavirus hits its peak.
That’s a lot of ventilators, MAINGEAR is here to deliver.
The New Jersey-based company normally makes gaming PCs and laptops (among other gamer-related products), but in this time of crisis they’ve swapped manufacturing over to something in extreme demand: ventilators. Their latest product is called MAINGEAR LIV, a cheap, easy-to-use, and easy to mass-produce ventilator designed for just such an emergency.
“It was clear once this situation began to escalate that something had to be done,” said MAINGEAR CEO Wallace Santos. “Within days of assembling our team, we had our first prototype ventilator ready to go. Besides the lack of medical supplies and equipment, we think there will be a shortage of medical professionals who can operate these devices especially in field hospitals, so we also made it incredibly simple to use. Now we need help getting the word out to the appropriate people.”
MAINGEAR LIV is designed to not just be used by trained professionals but also by complete amateurs. It has a touchscreen interface that lets even a medical novice navigate to several pre-set standard settings so that a patient can get care immediately if there aren’t enough doctors and nurses–a real concern in the current crisis. Other failsafe measures include a redundant power supply and power circuits, as well as “a unique coupling device that contains and drains exhaled aerosolized virus from the patient while allowing routine maintenance under severe conditions.”
Best of all, MAINGEAR LIV is cheap. It can be made for a quarter of the price of traditional ventilators, making it a great choice for strained hospital budgets.
MAINGEAR is currently in talks with the FDA for emergency approval and will hopefully start shipping ventilators soon.
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