In a series of tweets over the past weeks, Elon Musk, the Co-founder and CEO at Tesla stepped up and made promises to help New York with the growing demand of ventilators amid the coronavirus pandemic, with the first batch delivering later on Friday.
As a response to Musk’s largesse, Bill de Blasio replied on Twitter writing “We are deeply grateful.”
With New York being the epicenter, with 53,455 total cases, people in acute care are in dire need of ventilators and other medical supplies. Elon Musk made the provision for around 1,255 ventilators from FDA approved ResMed, Medtronic, and Philips from China last week and shipped them to Los Angeles.
Owing to the rise of the number of cases, with several cities in US under lockdown and shortage of medical supplies, Tesla and other companies are reaching out to healthcare facilities with medical supplies, masks, protective equipment under the Defense Production Act which can force manufacturers to produce required supplies in desperate times of emergency.
Tesla also announced to open the New York plant “as humanly as possible” to manufacture ventilators, after already having donated about 50,000 N-95 masks to several hospitals in the US.