California has the capacity to produce enough ventilators to meet its projected needs in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Saturday during a tour of a San Jose energy company that has repurposed its manufacturing plant to refurbish outdated ones. But he cautioned that the state’s need could expand significantly if the public doesn’t maintain social distancing and cases grow.
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Bloom Energy Chief Executive KR Sridhar said his company’s employees had to quickly learn the inner workings of ventilators, a machine they hadn’t worked with before.
“A week ago, none of us knew anything about ventilators other than we knew what it was being used for,” Sridhar said. “But at the end of the day, here’s what we knew. … There are electrical devices, mechanical devices, floor devices. We understand them all.”
Employees had to learn on the job quickly. On Thursday, their first day working in the repurposed facility, Bloom employees refurbished 24 ventilators. On Friday, they refurbished 80, and Sridhar said 120 more would be done by the end of the day Saturday.
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The state has more than 4,000 ventilators in its stockpile beyond the ones already in hospitals, and Newsom’s goal is to get to 10,000, whether that’s through manufacturing or purchasing ventilators from other countries.
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