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Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(107,063 posts)
Wed Apr 8, 2020, 01:49 PM Apr 2020

How New York City's Emergency Ventilator Stockpile Ended Up on the Auction Block

In July 2006, with an aggressive and novel strain of the flu circulating in Asia and the Middle East, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a sweeping pandemic preparedness plan.

Using computer models to calculate how a disease could spread rapidly through the city’s five boroughs, experts concluded New York needed a substantial stockpile of both masks and ventilators. If the city confronted a pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu, the experts found, it would face a “projected shortfall of between 2,036 and 9,454 ventilators.”

The city’s department of health, working with the state, was to begin purchasing ventilators and to “stockpile a supply of facemasks,” according to the report. Shortly after it was released, Bloomberg held a pandemic planning summit with top federal officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, now the face of the national coronavirus response.

In the end, the alarming predictions failed to spur action. In the months that followed, the city acquired just 500 additional ventilators as the effort to create a larger stockpile fizzled amid budget cuts.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/nyc-emergency-ventilator-stockpile-auction-block-980156/

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How New York City's Emergency Ventilator Stockpile Ended Up on the Auction Block (Original Post) Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin Apr 2020 OP
Propublica: Taxpayer funded ventilators hijacked by kushner SheltieLover Apr 2020 #1
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