Elon Musk donates ventilators to help his country through a hard time

Charlotte Eykerman & Nanor Pontigian Opinion Editor & Science and Tech Editor, The Pawprint

Bill de Blasio, New York City’s Mayor recently, stated that the billionaire Elon Musk has promised to donate ventilators. Elon Musk wants help providing for patients that have been diagnosed with the Coronavirus. The ventilators help the patient’s with their breathing since the virus will affect the patient’s lungs.

Currently, New York has the highest number of COVID-19 cases across the US. Therefore they are focusing on distributing the ventilators across New York Hospitals. According to New York’s Governor, they need almost 30,000 ventilators to prepare for the rest of this outbreak. 

Elon Musk has just purchased 1,255 ventilators from a few buyers and he has officially confirmed that he will be giving all the ventilators away either they are bought or built by them.

Earlier in the month, Musk guaranteed to reopen Tesla’s gigafactory. The factory originally was used to make solar cells, but he then used his plan to instead make more ventilators for hospitals that need them.

This generous gesture seems to show a change in Musk’s opinion towards the Coronavirus, in the beginning of March he tweeted that the panic caused by the virus was “dumb” and even suggested that children were “essentially immune” to the virus, which is false. 

Bill de Blasio, New York City’s Mayor tweets, “I spoke with @elonmusk late last night. He’s donating hundreds of ventilators to New York City and State, including our public hospitals. We’re deeply grateful. We need every ventilator we can get our hands on these next few weeks to save lives.”

Currently, Tesla is not the only car company that has offered to help produce ventilators and other needed supplies. Ford and General Motors had originally intended to do so as well, but things changed after Donald Trump started accusing them of overcharging the ventilators.

On Friday, Trump tweeted, “As usual with ‘this’ General Motors, things just never seem to work out. They said they were going to give us 40,000 much needed Ventilators, ‘very quickly’. Now they are saying it will only be 6000, in late April, and they want top dollar. Always a mess with Mary B. Invoke ‘P’.”

There are rumours that on Monday, Musk tweeted that the ventilators that he had shipped were currently stuck in LAX. The airport quickly responded to this claim to say that their customs had no delayed shipments. 

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