A team from the Fac­ul­ty of En­gi­neer­ing, UWI St Au­gus­tine has em­barked on a project to lo­cal­ly man­u­fac­ture ven­ti­la­tors, face shields, N95 face masks for med­ical pro­fes­sion­als as well as face masks for the gen­er­al pub­lic in the face of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

But the team has asked for sup­port from com­pa­nies and cit­i­zens to en­sure the project is a suc­cess.

Ac­cord­ing to a state­ment from the UWI, since ini­tial work be­gan in mid-March 2020, this project has re­ceived sup­port from the Min­istry of Health, Trinidad and To­ba­go Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion, CARIRI—The Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute—lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers, and com­pa­nies such as La­bel House, Ad­vanced Foam, Ace Print­ery, Lensyl Prod­ucts, Daisy’s Ex­clu­sive, TYE Man­u­fac­tur­ing, MIC, Peake Tech­nolo­gies Lim­it­ed, Ther­mo­plas, Elec­trosign Ltd. and V&S Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals.

But the uni­ver­si­ty said there is much more to be done.

As such the team needs fund­ing, ma­te­ri­als for face masks and res­pi­ra­tors, me­chan­i­cal and in­dus­tri­al com­po­nents for ven­ti­la­tors, as well as oth­er in-kind re­sources, and ap­pro­pri­ate con­nec­tions in the fields of pro­cure­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing.

It has called on com­pa­nies and the gen­er­al pub­lic to join in this spe­cial #UWIA­gain­st­COVID19 ini­tia­tive.