Gates Package — page 999

poor roads added to the delivery time. New supplies were often delayed, and sometimes never arrived at all. In 2014, Olayo created an organization called Hewatele--the Swahili word for "abundant air"--to try a different approach. With funding from local and international investors, Hewatele built oxygen plants at several of the busiest hospitals in the country, where demand is highest and reliable electricity for production is available. It devised a milkman model: Oxygen cylinders would regularly be dropped off at remote hospitals and clinics and the empty cylinders returned for a refill. Using this new approach, Hewatele has cut the market price for oxygen in Kenya by 50 percent and reached some 35,000 patients. And as I write this, the group is looking to expand within Kenya and to other parts of Africa.11 In addition to needing oxygen, patients who are severely sick might need to be intubated--have a tube put down their windpipe--and use a ventilator to help them breathe. In extreme cases, people's lungs might be so badly damaged that they can no longer oxygenate the blood, and a machine will need to do it for them. Just like oxygen supplies, the medical expertise and equipment needed to do these things was already hard to come by in many lower-income countries before COVID, a problem that the pandemic has multiplied many times over. A recurring theme of this book is that we don't have to choose between preventing pandemics and improving global health more broadly--they reinforce each other. This is a classic example: If we do a better job of equipping the world's health systems with oxygen and other tools, as Hewatele is doing, then more health care workers will have the equipment they need to deal with everyday problems like pneumonia and premature births. And during a crisis, like an outbreak that's threatening to become a pandemic, they'll be able to save lives and stop the disease from overwhelming the entire health system. Each makes the other stronger.