The Director General of Rwanda Biomedical Centre (RBC), Dr Sabin Nsanzimana announced Sunday that only ten sickest Covid-19 patients have been admitted to intensive care struggling to breathe.Yet Rwanda doesn’t have enough ventilators as it prepares for “all scenarios, the senior health official explained that there are many reasons why ten patient were put on a ventilator.

“We have decided to put these patients on mechanical ventilators to decrease the amount of energy they are using on breathing so their body can concentrate on fighting infection,” Dr Nsanzimana said.

According to hi, currently only ten COVID-19 patients are admitted in intensive care but some other few patients have also be on a ventilator for short period of time.

In April this year, a team of Rwandan biomedical engineers have developed a ventilator following the COVID-19 outbreak, which is the first locally made ventilator in the East African country.

The developers came up with the idea of producing locally made ventilators following the reported breathing complications caused by COVID-19 in areas where the virus has killed people due to lack of
ventilators, he said.

Their supervisor, professor Stephen Rulisa from School of Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Rwanda, said that the prototype works well and it is “really encouraging to see that our young engineers can produce something smart like this.

In addition to locally-made equipment, he United States Government, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), donated 100 new state-of-the-art ventilators to Rwanda in July this year to fight against COVID-19.

These 100 Zoll Portable Critical Care ventilators, manufactured in the United States, are leading-edge and in-demand technology to help COVID-19 patients to breathe.

As of Saturday, Rwanda’s total confirmed cases of Covid-19 has reached 2,889 after the country recorded the highest one-day spike since the outbreak in March this year,

Currently, The number of active cases are 1,124 and 11 people have succumbed to the viral disease so far,