COVID-19 care | Philips introduces mobile ICUs for India

"Designed to meet the critical-care requirements of patients, each pre-fabricated ICU has a capacity for nine beds and will be locally manufactured by Philips in India," the company said in a statement.

PTI

June 30, 2020 / 04:17 PM IST

Representative image

In view of the challenging needs of critical-care services in the India, global health technology major Royal Philips on June 30 said it has introduced mobile intensive care units (ICUs) in the country.

"Designed to meet the critical-care requirements of patients, each pre-fabricated ICU has a capacity for nine beds and will be locally manufactured by Philips in India," it said in a statement.

Each ICU unit can be assembled in one day at the chosen site.These portable ICUs will be helpful to government agencies and organisations looking to enhance community outreach and to mitigate the impact of natural disasters and pandemics like the ongoing COVID-19, it added.

When asked about the cost of a mobile nine-bed ICU, Philips India told PTI in an e-mailed response, "Price of a pre-fabricated 9-bed ICU begins from 1 crore approximately and can be customized further depending upon the requirement from the customer".

The company will be directly selling them to the hospitals, it added.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

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There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

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