Ingenious ways companies around the world are transforming objects into ventilators

• Hospitals are facing a critical shortage of ventilators to treat coronavirus patients with severe respiratory problems.
• Companies around the world, including American car companies like Tesla and Ford and an Israel missile company, are shifting production to ventilators to fight the shortage.
• Meanwhile, researchers are coming up with brilliant ways to produce ventilators more easily and cheaply.
• View more episodes of Business Insider Today on Facebook.

For coronavirus patients, ventilators can be life-saving devices.

But the overwhelming number of coronavirus cases has led to a worldwide shortage of ventilators, leaving hospitals scrambling for the machines as cases of COVID-19 spike.

To fight the shortage, companies around the world are shifting production to ventilators. Among them are American car companies like Ford and Tesla, an Israeli missile company, and a Japanese company that's converting ventilators designed for animals into ones that humans can use.

Meanwhile, engineers and researchers are devising ingenious ways for companies to mass-produce ventilators.

Read on to see how people around the world are working to make more ventilators.

Employees at Tesla created a prototype for a ventilator made from Model 3 parts.

In late March, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, offered free ventilators to hospitals that needed them.

But Musk faced some criticism when it appeared the machines he sent hospitals were not the life-supporting ventilators hospitals need most, but a type of ventilator more commonly used to treat sleep apnea.

Since then, Tesla has been working to build its own ventilators out of parts used for its Model 3 car.

"We've been working on developing our own ventilator design, specifically one that's heavily based on Tesla car parts," Joseph Mardall, engineering director at Tesla, told Reuters.

In Michigan, Ford and GE plan to use a former automotive plant to build a ventilator that doesn't need electricity.

Ford announced in late March it was working on plans with GE Healthcare to use a former automotive plant to build a ventilator that runs on air pressure instead of electricity.

The companies expect to get started in late April producing 50,000 ventilators in the first 100 days and then 30,000 a month going forward.

A company in Tokyo that makes ventilators for animals is converting its machines to use for people.

Among the companies fighting the ventilator shortage is Metran, a small Japanese firm that makes veterinary ventilators for cats and dogs.

The company is now converting its animal ventilators into ones that adult humans can use, with the company's founder noting that humans and other mammals have similar respiratory systems.

"They can be used on anything from mice to a horse," Metran founder Kazufuku Nitta told CBS News.

Japan's government asked Metran to modify the equipment for human use. Representatives from the United Kingdom, the United States, and India have also reached out to the company to ask for help.

A company in Israel known for making missiles rapidly shifted its production to ventilators.

In Tel Aviv, Israel, the company Aerospace Industries is most known for making missiles.

But the defense company has started using its missile factory to produce ventilators, delivering its first batch of 30 machines to Israel's health ministry on April 2.

At one clinic in France, doctors are repurposing snorkeling gear into ventilators.

In France, the Ambroise Pare Clinic outside of Paris converted scuba diving and snorkeling masks to medical use so that patients would not need tubes going into their lungs. These can help less severe cases of COVID-19.

Decathlon, the maker of the masks, suspended sales to the public and donated them to hospitals in need.

According to Reuters, the company has so far donated its stock of 30,000 diving masks to health personnel in France, as well as 30,000 more to hospitals in Spain and 10,000 in Italy.

In Belgium, an engineer devised an adapter for the masks on a 3D-printing machine.

Albert de Beir, an engineering teacher at Belgium's Vrije Universiteit Brussel, made an adapter for Decathlon ventilator masks on a 3D-printing machine.

The printed prototype became the model for a large order using medical-grade plastics.

In the Czech Republic, researchers designed a simple ventilator for others to produce around the world.

The design will be released to the public so that anyone can manufacture the ventilators instead of waiting for the finished product to be shipped from somewhere else.

The volunteer scientists and engineers behind the project said their ventilator will cost one-fifth the current market price, according to Reuters.

And in Slovakia, these students built a stopgap ventilator for patients waiting on more professional designs.

Student inventors at the Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, invented a prototype of a lung ventilator called Q-Vent. The simple machinery is described as stopgap equipment until more professional designs are produced.