Can you design and build a ventilator in 10 days? Entirely from local parts?
At the start of COVID-19, we were challenged to do just that by our local government here in South Wales, UK. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom as a whole was thought to need 30,000 machines within 8 weeks. Most ICU ventilators are made in other countries. This film shows our struggles with footage taken at the time and then later, in 2024, I travelled the UK to interview others who had been working on similar projects.

In the end, these machines were not needed as alternative treatments developed, but take your mind back to March 2020. COVID was heading our way, it had already overwhelmed Italy, there were no effective vaccines and nobody knew if things would become apocalyptic or not.

We worked on the basis that they would.

Many groups globally worked on similar projects. This is just a tiny snapshot of that time.