As the spread of coronavirus continues, America is facing medical supply shortages and domestic factories are volunteering manufacturing capacity to help ease the burden. According to a recent Mashable article, the latest instance is famous serial entrepreneur Elon Musk offering to make ventilators for hospitals “if there is a shortage.” The offer was in response to a tweet from a Telsa owner asking Musk to “repurpose your factory to make ventilators which are needed ASAP.”
An estimate from The Society of Critical Care Medicine suggests 960,000 people may need to be put on ventilators as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, and the U.S. only has about 200,000 of them. Less than a week later, Musk announced he’ll have 1,200 ventilators ready for delivery within days.
![“Another key [UDI] benefit, because we're calling that product by the same name across the healthcare supply chain… rich and robust data that we can access around supply consumption and utilization rates. One of the buzz terms we've heard during the COVID-19 crisis was what's my burn rate? How fast am I going through gowns, masks, gloves?” – Mike Schiller, Senior Director at AHRMM](https://img.healthcarepackaging.com/files/base/pmmi/all/image/2020/08/UDI.5f4d326e41d53.png?auto=format&fit=crop&h=146&w=340)
