4 ms·
Yup, I am surprised at the numebr of people here who think government should have stocked up on ventilators. Ventilators are not such a common requirement to de
by tathougies 7y ago
Yup, I am surprised at the numebr of people here who think government should have stocked up on ventilators. Ventilators are not such a common requirement to defeat a virus. How do we know what virus will emerge next? COVID-19 needs a ventilator to mitigate side effects. But does it really make sense to stock up on hundreds of thousands of ventilators, when you only really need a few thousand in any given year? What if the next virus is an hemmorhagic fever, or something completely novel? How do you prepare reasonably and with finite resources for something we do not know? No one can answer these questions.
The fact is that if we had bought hundreds of thousands of ventilators and not enough fluid replacement (for Ebola for example) and Ebola was the pandemic, not COVID-19, then everyone would blame the government for preparing the wrong thing. How can anyone know?
- pwinnski 7y agoWe are not prepared for anything right now, though. We have literally closed the government agency focused on things like Ebola or COVID-19, and we lack even the stockpiles of general supplies we had in 2009. To have prepared for the wrong thing would be unfortunate. To be prepared for nothing should be criminal.
- tathougies 7y ago> We have literally closed the government agency focused on things like Ebola or COVID-19, and we lack even the stockpiles of general supplies we had in 2009. Can you please cite what you are talking about? Neither the CDC nor FDA are closed. W.r.t the masks, I completely agree. This has been a decade's worth of failure. Why weren't the masks replaced in 2010? There should be an investigation for sure.
- pwinnski 7y agoI don't have any links that don't read like partisan snipes, and I'm not trying to start a partisan squabble. After Ebola, we established the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. In recent years, it was closed down.