"The results are incredible." Italy passed the 10,000 death mark since the start of the coronavirus pandemic on Saturday, and is to date the most affected country in the world. Hospitals are struggling to cope with the crisis, sometimes setting up their own D system. To make up for the lack of respirators, for example, some resuscitation services have turned back ... to diving masks.
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"Our hospitals are in great difficulty. To help them, we had the idea of dismantling the masks and adding a pipe which passes oxygen there," explains Christian Fracassi, an engineer from Lombardy, the region from Italy most affected by the epidemic. He decided to put his small innovation company at the service of hospitals which are experiencing a shortage of equipment.
A system "not yet approved"
The idea is to connect 3D printed tubes to a particular mask model, manufactured by Decathlon. "For the moment our product is not yet approved, so it should only be used in an emergency. But it already saves lives," he said at the microphone of Europe 1.
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To share the idea with as many people as possible, and for free, the inventors published the user manual on the internet. Eleven hospitals are said to already use it in Italy, and four abroad. For its part, the Italian branch of Decathlon has promised to distribute 10,000 masks that can be converted into respirators, throughout the country.