There is no doubt that the United States lacks the number of ventilators to properly treat all the anticipated coronavirus patients. Several mayors, governors, and health experts have made urgent requests for the life-saving machines. But now Donald Trump is making his own assessment, “A lot of equipment is being asked for that I don’t think they will need.” The president’s remarks came during a phone interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity.
“They say, like Governor Cuomo and others, we want 30,000 of them. 30,000. You go to hospitals, they’ll have one in a hospital and now all of a sudden everybody’s asking for these vast numbers.”
“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”
Friday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo addressed this:
“I don’t have a crystal ball. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion. But I don’t operate here on opinion. I operate on facts and on data and on numbers and on projections. We have Cornell Weil, which is making projections, the CDC is making projections, McKenzie and Company is making projections for us. All the projections say you could have an apex needing 140,000 beds and about 40,000 ventilators. Those are numbers. Not I feel, I think or I believe, I want to believe. Make the decisions based on the data and the science and we are following the data and the science and that’s what the data and the science says.
I hope we don’t need 30,000 ventilators, I hope some natural weather change happens overnight and kills the virus globally. That’s what I hope. But, that’s my hope, that’s my emotions and my thought. The numbers say you may need 30,000. “
Conservative analyst Bill Kristol challenged Trump, writing:
Mr. Trump: Man up. Go to NYC. (You can fly a sanitized AF1.) Go to an ICU. (You can wear a hazmat suit.) Then tell the doctors and patients they don’t need more ventilators.
Meanwhile, while downplaying the urgent need for ventilators, Trump also managed to insult some of the governors who are making requests for the equipment including the governor of Michigan, whose name Trump couldn’t remember.
Trump’s comments come on the same day we learned the U.S. may not be closing a big deal for ventilators. The New York Times reported:
The White House had been preparing to reveal on Wednesday a joint venture between General Motors and Ventec Life Systems that would allow for the production of as many as 80,000 desperately needed ventilators to respond to an escalating pandemic when word suddenly came down that the announcement was off.
The Times says “the decision to cancel… came after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it needed more time to assess whether the estimated cost was prohibitive. That price tag was more than $1 billion.”
“Some government officials expressed concern about the possibility of ordering too many ventilators, leaving them with an expensive surplus.”
In the meantime, some cities are getting ventilators from places outside the government.