Coronavirus: Government orders 10,000 ventilators from Dyson

The article below contains relevant business updates.

The government has ordered 10,000 ventilators from Dyson to help deal with the coronavirus crisis.

The firm, headed by British inventor Sir James Dyson, said it had designed a new type of ventilator in response to a call on behalf of the NHS.

The order is still subject to the devices passing stringent medical tests but that is expected to happen quickly.

Dyson has had hundreds of engineers working round the clock to design the ventilators from scratch.

Blitz spirit

It hopes to build the ventilators at scale from its UK base in Wiltshire - using aircraft hangars that were used to stuff parachutes in the World War Two.

However, the blitz spirit the company is keen to channel will not produce immediate results.

It is thought that even if regulatory approval is forthcoming, it could take a couple of weeks to move from prototype to the device being made in significant scale.

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