A spike in coronaviruses cases in some areas of the U.S. has resulted in the need for ventilators in area hospitals that are similar to the ventilator crisis at the beginning of the epidemic last spring.
The hospitals in Omaha, Nebraska reported a record number of patients on ventilators and a hospital in Keene, New Hampshire on the same day requested additional ventilators from the state government. The U.S. no longer has a shortage of life-saving equipment.
A little-known conversation between Tesla TSLA CEO Elon Musk and Geoff Martha, CEO of Medtronic MDT, was part of the surge in production of ventilators at the height of the crisis last year.
Musk, whose company SpaceX helped create a key ventilator part, struck a friendly tone in the midst of the stressful early days of the Pandemic and demonstrated a deep understanding of the engineering details, Martha says.
Medtronic, the supplier of a third of the world's ventilators, produced 200 per week prior to the pandemic but quickly ramped up production to 1,000 per week, Martha told Yahoo Finance in a new interview.
To ramp up production, Medtronic had to overcome a supply chain disruption that caused a shortage of key parts. An engineer at SpaceX noticed that a critical part of Medtronic's ventilators was matched to a part used in SpaceX rockets, and Medtronic took the unusual step of posting its ventilator designs online.
Martha says that a ventilator is a life support system, if you think it has a life support system.
Martha adds that I'm on the phone with Elon Musk, and he really became a good partner of ours.
Martha says that the phone call between Musk and Martha was about to confirm the value of a partnership between the two companies they led.
Musk wanted to validate that we really needed it, and they could really be of assistance, but he was very supportive and very easy to talk to, Martha says. Given all the businesses he has, I was surprised how much he knew about this one part. Martha says he told us the whole story about how he saw the supply chain not very reliable. He decided to insource it. He was very down to earth, very friendly, and very deep into the details, and was very helpful, Martha says.
In order to increase the production, Medtronic also formed partnerships with tech company Intel INTC, as well as manufacturers in Bangladesh, India, Canada, and the United States, according to Martha.
The New York Times reported last month that the spread of the coronaviruses was widely known, and U.S. hospitals had around 160,000 ventilators, plus an additional 12,700 machines in the U.S. stockpile. The Washington Post found that the U.S. stockpile had 95,713 ventilators five months later, in August 2020.
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