From the New York Post:
We didn’t have to have ventilator shortage — leaders chose not to prep for pandemic
Hospitals in New York are running short. To his credit, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is doing his best, but he admits “you can’t find available ventilators no matter how much you’re willing to pay right now, because there is literally a global run on ventilators.”
It’s a little late. Several years ago, after learning that the Empire State’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than the 18,000 New Yorkers would need in a severe pandemic, state public-health leaders came to a fork in the road.
They could have chosen to buy more ventilators to back up the supplies hospitals maintain. Instead, the health commissioner, Howard Zucker, assembled a task force for rationing the ventilators they already had.
In 2015, the state could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $576 million. It’s a lot of money, but in hindsight, spending half a percent of the budget to prepare for pandemic was the right thing to do.
Holy shit.
See, we preppers* get made fun of all the time by the Left (and sometimes the Right) for being ready in case of an emergency. We are told we are paranoid kooks. We are told that when disaster strikes, the government will be there to rescue us.
Then we find out that the government had the chance to and were recommended to prepare for this disaster because of the precedent set by the last foreign origin lethal respiratory virus, and they chose not to.
Apparently prepping for disaster is so paranoid and ridicule-worthy that even the government we are supposed to trust won’t do it.
This news falls on the heels of the news that the Obama administration used up the national stockpile of N95 respirators and didn’t replenish the stockpile.
Following the 2009 H1N1 swine flu crisis, US leaders realized how desperately larger reserves of medical supplies were needed in hospitals.
A health security document discussing the lessons learned from the emergency said: “A major difficulty during the response to 2009 H1N1 influenza was being able to project supply and demand for N95 respirators and facemasks because of the uncertainty of the pandemic and the complexity of the supply chain system.”
According to the LA Times, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks be replenished.
This nation went through this once before in my adult lifetime, back in 2009, and the government reacted by saying “getting ready for the next one will be too expensive, so fuck it, we’ll just come up with a better system of deciding who dies.”
What did they choose to spend the money on? Who the fuck knows, but I guarantee it wasn’t anything useful.
No wonder the Democrats are doing their very best to blame Trump for the Coronavirus outbreak. They are trying to get ahead of being asked why they bumblefucked the government preparation after the H1N1 outbreak.
When this is over, these people need to have their feet held to the fire. I honestly wouldn’t be opposed to some sort to Nuremberg like trial for all of these politicians as to why they dropped the ball so fucking hard.
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*Addendum:
We need to take back the word prepper as something positive.
It conjures up the mental image of a kooky hermit in surplus BDUs with a bunker made out of a buried shipping container in the woods with 10 years worth of freeze-dried food.
Maybe this was because of the guys who thought Y2K would be the end of the world and the media latched onto that idea and ran with it.
But as I’ve said before, you can take the boy out of Florida but you can’t take the Florida out of the boy. I live my life with hurricane preparedness in the back of my mind. I have one to two weeks worth of everything I need (food, paper products, etc) on a storage rack or in a freezer in my garage. New stuff comes in and older stuff makes it way out of inventory.
I keep my power tool batteries charged, at least one pickup truck full of gas, and god knows how much ammo and batteries. Not to mention a tote full of flashlights.
This served me well in South Dakota when a blizzard could shut down the town and trucks from coming in on the highway.
You don’t need to be a kooky guy with a buried bunker to be a prepper. You just need to be a guy with enough foresight to have what you need for a reasonable period of time onhand in case a bunch of assholes buy out the grocery store and your weekly grocery run is a bust.
People will disagree on what “a reasonable period of time” is, but that aside, another question is balance.
Got a week of food? Great. What else do you need a week’s worth of, that might become hard to get? Water? Medicine? Baby food? Etc. Having 20k+ rounds of 5.56, 10 AR-style rifles, and 200 magazines, but a food store that consists of a single expired can of Chef Boyardee, isn’t prepared.
Just something I’ve been mulling on this past week or so.
We have been semi prepared for a long time. But life gets in the way. We now (late yes) have put plans in place and are doing them. We aren’t in dire Straits by no means just short on some stuff. Should be interesting when this is “over”….
The one I keep hearing from people I chat with online, is just how many people in Florida have no degree of preparation for hurricanes. No dry food; very little canned food; no bottles or jugs of water to cycle through the rest of the year; no idea how to set aside water to flush a toilet; no idea how to store and preserve tap water safely.
I was talking with some millenials, (and yes people in their late 20’s early 30’s are millenials under all definitions) and they accused me of A) being a prepper (i am by no means what I would consider a prepper) and B) intentionally serving to scare people needlessly with my prepper ideas
When I tried to tell them what I was talking about was just basic Florida hurricane prep that everyone is told multiple times every year, and every grocery store hands you a free flyer about it with every shopping cart; they did the electronic text equivalent of the bemused cat or dog, “I’ve never done any of that.”
I’m old enough to remember Hurricane Andrew. I think the need for two weeks of stuff was burned into Flordians’ brains by Andrew. That was the first time in a very long time that a Hurricane did more than knock out the power for more than a day or two.
I suspect that the people you are talking about don’t remember Andrew or were not even alive when it happened. They didn’t learn the lesson the hard way.
““… how many people in Florida have no degree of preparation for hurricanes.”
&
“I’d be willing to bet that a huge percentage of them (if not all) are millennial transplants from a progtard *utopia* somewhere up north.”
For question one, my answer was anybody who moved during the 10-12 years of peace after Wilma.
For question 2: I am guessing those numbers went down a bit after Hurricane Maria.
“… how many people in Florida have no degree of preparation for hurricanes.”
I’d be willing to bet that a huge percentage of them (if not all) are millennial transplants from a progtard *utopia* somewhere up north.
They know nothing about adulting, believe the government will provide them with everything they think they deserve, and they’d rather spend $2,000+ on a pair of the latest shiny iPhones than on 2 weeks worth of basic hurricane preparedness.
They’re the proverbial grasshopper partying it out without a care, until the shit hits the fan. I have no pity for those people.
I was a “survivalist” back in the 80’s. I refused to become a “prepper”. Sounds too much like “preppy”, which was another term from the 80’s.
So, I shall remain a “survivalist”.
ALICE gear with the little alligator embroidered? 😀