Because I guess once all those people are corralled in, it could be even more, the production.

Yes. We’ve got this within a week without really asking, so if it’s co-ordinated and HM government puts its weight behind it, I think it could just be massive. It’s a simple, IKEA-type ventilator. We could supply people with a box of parts and say: ​“Just assemble it.”

So how much have you slept over the last week, Andrew?

Not much. Not much. When we got the electronics working at about 4:30am on Sunday morning, we were sort of too elated to go to bed, because we saw the lungs: we’ve got a dummy patient with lungs that you can see in their chest and we were twiddling the knobs and you could alter the size of the breath, pressure in the breath, the inspired/​expired time ratio. All the things you could want to control, we were just twiddling with the knobs, watching it. It was extraordinary. So anyway, we had this pitch at 1:30pm and this afternoon was the first break we’ve had since we started last Monday morning. We decided not to do any WhatsApps or emails, to have an afternoon off, and then we’ll go headlong back in tomorrow.

Hopefully with a yes from the government.

Hopefully. It’s possible, and this is what I’m hoping… I rather suspect the government won’t commit itself to one design, nor will it want to have competing designs. We shan’t be competing for the same components in the supply chain. If you want standard ventilator parts then if you have two designs that are sort of similar, using the same stuff, then there’ll be a bottleneck. Our design, even if you do it in parallel with another, won’t compete with it, because we’re just not using anything like the components they would use.

We are ready to go, we are simple, and we can knock it out very quickly and could just plug the surge in the next two weeks. By that time it would give a bit more lead time to anyone who wants to make a more sophisticated, conventional ventilator. But if we just relied on conventional ventilator design, there’d be a huge number of deaths before they’re delivered.

I think it might be sensible, if I was the government, to say these guys have their simple design that they can knock out in a week, and in two or three weeks we should have something a bit smarter coming online. And even if we haven’t got anything a bit smarter, this is still good enough. I’m rather hoping their logic will work like that.