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Top1. Introduction
Clinical ventilators are intended to convey breaths to patients with breathing difficulty. These are equipment that should be present in every medical facility, however, due to the cost of obtaining standardised equipment, ventilators are usually not found in most facilities in developing countries (Jha, 2017). Furthermore, the high-resilience advanced pressure sensors and, pneumatic segments with multi-layered programming, add to the significant expense and mechanical or electrical risk of numerous advancements in the standardised ventilators. This, therefore, requires the presence of skilled personnel to operate.
There is increasing pressure on the Nigerian healthcare system which is grossly underinvested. Statistical data showed that approximately 20% of COVID affected patients requires hospitalisation with 7.5% requiring the need for intensive care according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) (Ferguson et al., 2020). Presently, there are only 330 ICU facilities in the country as well as five testing centres and treatment facilities for the pandemic as part of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) measures to contain the infection. It is very obvious that these numbers are highly discouraging and cannot be feasible in meeting the need of the population of over 200 million. To make matters worse, most of these facilities are not even up to international standard. The impact of COVID-19 has also been significant in the older population than the younger population with the average mortality age being 79.
In the developed countries, where advanced clinical facilities are broadly accessible, the issue is of an alternate sort(Namatovu, & Semwanga, 2020). While there are enough ventilators for customary use, there is a need for readiness for instances of mass setback such as pandemics, catastrophic events etc (Netland, 2020). There have been several cases where health personnel were forced to resort to manual BVM ventilation when there were insufficient numbers of ventilators such as the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Currently, the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) keeps spreading all over the world at a rapid rate and most countries are having difficulty in curbing the pandemic spread (Mishra & Mishra, 2021; Mustafa, 2021; Das 2021; Sahoo 2021).
Countries with a large population in Africa such as Nigeria, South Africa etc have struggled to contain the virus and there is a high risk of large number of cases going by the extremely negligible amount of test which has been carried out. Needless to say, it is only logical that more people might be infected thereby putting significant strain on the medical infrastructures due to the lack of essential equipment necessary for combating this viral infection. Be that as it may, there is a requirement for an economical convenient ventilator for which production can be scaled upon request.
Figure 1.
Statistics showing ventilator capacity of African countries (Ruth & Marks, 2020)
The figure above shows the ventilator capacities of some African countries in relation to the total population. The chart indicates an obvious lack of adequate ventilating capacity that will be required in case of an unprecedented increase in coronavirus infection rate which could be potentially deadly as a result of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS).