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The Southern Alberta Institute of Technology has lent Alberta 13 ventilators as the province stockpiles the potentially life-saving machines ahead of the expected peak of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Meena Kumar, academic chair of SAIT’s life sciences portfolio, said the polytechnic has met regularly with Alberta Health Services to discuss the novel coronavirus pandemic. When AHS asked if it could borrow some of the machines, Kumar said the decision was easy to make.

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“Since our classes now have moved off-campus and are online at this time, it didn’t make sense to keep the ventilators being unused in an empty location,” Kumar said. “We were glad to help in any way that we could.”

Alberta is stocking up on ventilators in an effort to avoid devastating consequences seen in countries like Italy and Spain, where health-care systems were overloaded by COVID-19 and doctors were forced to make decisions on who would get access to the devices.