Lets assume what you say is correct, which i'm sure it mostly is considering their models probably have a ton of slack built in.

How do you reconcile that with the fact that we only have a fixed amount of ventilators and the fact that what Cuomo is asking for is twice that reserve.

Like if you were a policy maker, Cuomo asks for 30,000 (for just in case because in a week or two we might actually need that many in NYS) more, you can only provide 16,000. Do you give him essentially all reserves so NYS is stocked up while the other 49 states you do exactly what...?

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Mar 29 2020 03:38pm

Of course models have slack built in. There's uncertainty in everything and you need to account for that. Wouldn't it be better to have extra ventilators than to have a deficit? If you have a deficit, people die. That's why Italy has a 10% death rate at the moment and that's why the Imperial College study predicted that 2 million would die due to lack of health care (in addition to the 2 million who would die of COVID) if we didn't implement social distancing policies.

If I was a policy maker, I would have invoked the Defense Production Act 2 weeks ago to build more ventilators. I would have also ensure that a billion COVID tests are produced by mid April. Obviously that can't happen because Trump is in over his head.

If wishes were fishes, wed all cast nets

Totally agree on the bold except it's a scarce resource currently. So when the virus starts to spread to other massive metro areas like Philly, Boston, Chicago, etc which i think we can agree will, you've already sent all of your fixed supply ventilators to one place.

If we really think about it, we will essentially be deciding which parts of the country or cities get to fair better. I mean live in NYS so i suppose i'll say thank you for all the extra ventilators that you guys want us to have but hopefully Thors meemaw and peepaw in Mississippi get one too if they ever need it.

Yeah i agree, if only Trump had a magical genie in a bottle to be able to churn out billions of tests, millions of ventilators, stop the virus and so on.

So build fucking more. That's the whole POINT of the Defense Production Act. We're going to get tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of more ventilators because companies like GM are BUILDING them now. Why do you keep acting like this is some fixed resource?

As for the tests, it can easily be done and we already have tens of millions in production now. I'm just pointing out that many people would have acted much sooner than Trump after looking at what happened to Italy.

We're doing the right thing NOW, it's just that we could have saved a lot more lives if we acted earlier, that's all. We don't need a magic genie, this is all within the realm of possibilities given that it's being done NOW. Like, during WW2 would you have said, "WELL, we don't have enough aircraft carriers so let's surrender to the Japanese?"

You do realise covid is not the only use for ventilators right?

Listening to Trump speak on this exact issue right now on Bloomberg. We have 10,000 extra ventilators according to him. We are building more but that takes time and it would be extremely irresponsible for us to essentially make sure one state is doing okay while to leave every other one until we can make ventilators. There will be acute outbreaks in large metros pretty soon where we have to deploy these ventilators rapidly, do you think one city, once they have these ventilators will just be more than happy to give them up once they get them?

You do realize ventilators are pretty complex machinery right? It's not like building basic preventative masks that you can churn out like its nothing.

Well, in effect it IS like a fixed amount. This CV 19 is gonna peak and after it does, it would be most desirable to NOT end up with 2.5 million vents and tests... sitting around.

As usual, no matter what Trump "says" on Twitter, I would imagine the US govt. will, as usual, do the best it can, without getting too panic-y. It would be kind of foolish to crank out 5 million test kits, only to find out that we would end up needing something else manufactured to offer continued care for those that recovered. Both manufacturing and "adding" money to the system, have limits. Probably best NOT to use up all the US resources in the beginning, and then find out we need something else for continued care.







/e

The US is up to 140,960 cases now.

This post was edited by Ghot on Mar 29 2020 04:32pm

Peak? It's still mutating.
We have no idea what it will do.

As far as I know it hasn't mutated yet. Hopefully it never will.