United States European Command Donates Medical Equipment to State Emergency Medical Service to Support Latvia During COVID-19 Crisis

On Tuesday, November 16, U.S. Ambassador John Carwile presented the Latvian State Emergency Medical Service with eight mobile mechanical lung ventilators. 

The U.S. Embassy Office of Defense Cooperation worked with the Latvian Ministry of Health and State Emergency Medical Service (SEMS) to implement the project. The donation, totaling $216,000, was funded by the U.S. European Command Civic Engagement Program, adding to their previous donations of personal protective equipment, automatic surface disinfectant units, and single-patient transport systems. The ventilators are designed to provide optimal ventilation therapy to patients during transport and will be used in the SEMS emergency vehicles to transport critically-ill COVID-19 patients.

This donation is the eighth Civic Engagement project implemented by the U.S. Embassy Office of Defense Cooperation since 2020 to support COVID-19 control and prevention in Latvia. In total, the U.S. government through various funding sources has provided $850,000 worth of personal protective equipment and medical equipment to the Latvian government during the COVID-19 crisis.

In addition to these projects, the U.S. Embassy Office of Defense Cooperation has a long-standing cooperative relationship with SEMS. Since 2014, the Civic Engagement program has renovated four SEMS dispatch centers and, this September, a medical warehouse in Kandava. The total value of these projects is $3.5 million.