ABOVE: Engineers at University of La Sabana have put their prototype ventilator, which costs less than $3,000 to build, through a series of tests.
COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF LA SABANA
In March, as Colombia’s coronavirus cases were taking off, officials there selected a number of hospitals in the country to look after COVID-19 patients in need of intensive care. The University of La Sabana Teaching Hospital in the small city of Chía just outside Bogotá was to take in patients from across the Cundinamarca region, a patch of Andean plateau with nearly 3 million inhabitants. But the hospital only had 25 ventilators—hardly enough for the hundreds of patients expected to become so sick they’d need mechanical aid to breathe.
With no affordable ventilator options on the market, the vice president of University of La Sabana turned to Julian Echeverry and his colleagues in the institution’s mechanical engineering department, asking if ...
