Ranil advises govt. to purchase 2,000 ventilators from China immediately

By Saman Indrajith

Former Prime Minister and UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe yesterday called on the government to purchase at least 2,000 ventilators urgently to save the lives of people who would be infected by the new mutated variants of COVID-19 virus.

Wickremesinghe said that the local health system did not have enough ventilators to face an upsurge of COVID patients. The need to purchase ventilators had been included as one of the promises in the UNP election manifesto in 2019. If the government that came to power understood it as one of the needs of the health sector and started producing ventilators, by this time our country would have been in a better position to counter the threat from the variants of COVID-19 virus, Wickremsinghe said.

Addressing a meeting of party seniors using zoom technology, Wickremesinghe said that Kerala in India had a population similar to Sri Lanka and that the state government there had gathered 5,000 ventilators to face any emergency. Therefore Sri Lanka should purchase at least 2,000 ventilators immediately and if possible should increase that to 3,000. The UK too had started increasing the number of their ventilators. Their plan is to increase the number of ventilators by 8,000 and commissioned the vacuum cleaner production companies to produce ventilators immediately. China is a leading country in producing respiratory machines and equipment and the government should seek Chinese help to bring down as many ventilators as possible to face the upcoming threat of hospitals being filled with people with breathing difficulties, the UNP leader said.