Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York says his state needs tens of thousands of ventilators to respond to the escalating coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump doesn’t believe him. Speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News on Thursday, Trump again minimized the impact of the infectious outbreak in the United States, casting doubt on the need for so many of the respiratory devices in hospitals treating the disease.
“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” he said. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators. You go into major hospitals sometimes, and they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”
New York has become the new epicenter America’s public health crisis, with hospitals struggling to keep up with larger patient numbers and limited supplies, including masks, gowns, and ventilators. In severe cases of Covid-19, the illness caused by coronavirus, ventilators can allow patients to breathe with incapacitated lungs — a common outcome of the disease.Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said earlier on Thursday she was told that New York had enough ventilators to meet current needs.
While there may be shortages in urban areas like New York City, Birx said, there are other parts of the state “that have lots of ventilators and other parts of New York state that don‘t have any infections right now.““There is still significant — over a thousand or two thousand ventilators that have not been utilized yet,” Birx said. “Please, for the reassurance of people around the world, to wake up this morning and look at people talking about creating DNR situations — do not resuscitate situations for patients — there is no situation in the United States right now that warrants that kind of discussion.
“But Cuomo said on Tuesday that the state would need an additional 30,000 ventilators to be able to respond to the peak of the crisis, which is predicted to hit the state in about two weeks. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has sent only 400, Cuomo said. (The Trump administration later said it would send 4,000 from the federal stockpile.)
On Thursday, Cuomo said the state had begun converting several thousand anesthesia machines into ventilators and approved the “splitting” of ventilators between two patients — a practice the governor said was “not ideal, but we believe it’s workable.” “We are talking to the federal government about more ventilators” and still “shopping for ventilators, ourselves,” Cuomo said, adding that stockpiles of ventilators were located “all across the state” to deploy to regional hospitals.
But “the number of ventilators we need is so astronomical,” Cuomo warned, pegging the “apex number” of ventilators that could be required in New York at 40,000. The governor said New York is currently in possession of 12,000 ventilators, and he did not know when the state would reach peak demand. “We don’t have an estimate for when we would get there, and hopefully we never do,” Cuomo said.Cuomo’s comments appeared to anger top Trump officials, notably White House adviser Peter Navarro, who told, “Just a day or so ago when he was talking about not getting the ventilators he needed, that morning FEMA had sent 2,000 additional ventilators.
That afternoon there were 2,000 additional ventilators sent. My office personally had shepherded 400 ventilators the day before. And there will be more to follow.”New York Mayor Bill de Blasio clarified on Friday morning that the city had indeed received 2,500 ventilators over the last week or so, but it will soon need 15,000. “When the president says the state of New York doesn’t need 30,000 ventilators, with all due respect to him, he’s not looking at the facts of this astronomical growth of this crisis,” de Blasio told.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams sought to defend Trump’s remarks on Friday, saying that “when you look at some of the projections out there, they’re based on worst-case scenarios.” According to public health experts, Adams told “, the “models in many cases are way off.” He also claimed that the administration had “people on the ground” in New York City “who have told us that 1,000 ventilators are sitting in a warehouse right now that haven’t been used.”
