The Virgin Orbit ventilator is intended to provide automated, continuous or intermittent ventilatory support for patients suffering from respiratory failure. The beauty of the device is its simplicity, making it easy to deploy in a hospital or in the field, and extremely fast and inexpensive to manufacture.

The ventilator is, in essence, a very simple, very reliable, mechanical device designed to automate common manual resuscitators (also known as bag valve masks, and often referred to colloquially by the proprietary name “Ambu-bag”). The system can be used to treat moderate hypoxic and/or hypercarbic respiratory failure – in most settings, this would include the majority of COVID-19 patients – freeing up existing, more sophisticated ventilators to be used on patients with the most severe symptoms.