This article is part of Fast Company’s Lessons of COVID-19 package, exploring some of the ways America has changed since the pandemic hit and what we have learned from it. Click here to read the entire series.
In early March, as the coronavirus was spreading around the world but before it had fully taken hold in the United States, the shortage of ICU ventilators was already becoming a crisis.
Italian hospitals had issued guidelines for rationing ventilators, and experts were concerned that the U.S. stock could quickly be depleted if cases rose at the same rate that they were around the world.
In the midst of the uncertainty and growing panic, a group of entrepreneurs, engineers, and executives teamed up to work on an emergency bridge ventilator. Called the Spiro Wave, the resulting device was developed in under a month, even as New York locked down and supply chains faltered. At the end of that intense push, the group had FDA Emergency Use Authorization and a purchase order from New York City for 3,000 ventilators for the city’s stockpile.
Early March: ‘This is really coming to New York; it’s not us watching a theater’
As the coronavirus devastated Italy at the beginning of March, Scott Cohen and Marcel Botha heard from an Italian colleague in the Netherlands, imploring them to help find a solution to the ventilator shortage. While the men were well-positioned to explore innovative options—Cohen cofounded Newlab and Botha is the CEO of 10XBeta—Cohen wasn’t sure what they could actually do.