23/10/2020 (Agence Europe) – In response to a request for assistance from the Czech Republic to the European Commission, the EU has delivered 30 ventilators from the RescEU strategic equipment reserve to help this Member State fight Covid-19, the Commission announced on Thursday 22 October. The President of the institution, Ursula von der Leyen, said on the same day that she had spoken to Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš on the phone to confirm that “we are dispatching rapidly”. “We are dispatching a first set of 30 ventilators”, said the Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarčič, recalling on his Twitter account that this strategic reserve of the EU’s civil protection mechanism, created in March, aims to “avoid the situation from the end of February”, when the whole EU lacked equipment to deal with the pandemic. (AN)