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The Unlikely Story of the First 'Made in Vietnam' Ventilators to Fight
COVID-19

VOA News

   In times of war, factories were converted from making cars to making
   tanks and ships. In the time of the coronavirus, Vietnam has retooled a
   smartphone factory to churn out life-critical ventilators.

   For many nations fighting COVID-19, ventilators have highlighted a
   struggle of life and death and of medical shortages. For Vietnam, which
   reported no local COVID-19 cases in three months, the ventilators are
   an unlikely story of a little engine that could -- that is, could
   produce machines for a world in a pandemic.

   A conglomerate,Vingroup,founded by Vietnam's richest man,had never
   dabbled in medical devices before the pandemic, but now makes
   ventilators at a cost of $7,000 a piece, which is 30% less than the
   price of the Medtronic model on which they're based, according to
   BloombergNews.While other nations scramble to save patients and supply
   hospitals, Vietnam has the bandwidth to shift focus to making those
   supplies, in part, because it tackled the coronavirus early, resulting
   in 382 cases for all of 2020. Despite its smaller economy, Vietnam is
   now donating ventilators, masks, and other aid to richer nations.

   Many 'firsts'for Vietnam

   Vingroupannounced this month that its first batch of ventilators have
   rolled off the factory line and been donated to Singapore, Russia, and
   Ukraine. The larger economies are still in the thick of the
   COVID-19fight. Russia last week was accused of hacking western
   scientists for a vaccine, while Singapore reached the most COVID-19
   cases in Southeast Asia in April after it overlooked its migrant worker
   population.

   "We have all seen the mutual support in the hardest of periods," the
   Ambassador of Russia to Vietnam KonstantinVnukovsaid this month. "The
   ceremony of awarding ventilators to the Russian Federation today
   continued to affirm our fruitful friendship."

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