© Mike Segar/ReutersNew York Governor Andrew Cuomo speaks in front of stacks of medical protective supplies during a news conference at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, which will be partially converted into a temporary hospital during the coronavirus outbreak, March 24, 2020.
The ventilator shortages of which we were all gravely warned have not yet come to pass.
In March, one of the most feared aspects of the pandemic was the widely reported coming shortage of ventilators.
One well-publicized estimate, repeated by the New York Times, the New Yorker and CNN, was that the U.S. would need roughly one million ventilators, or more than five times as many as we had. Gulp. Ventilators are expensive, they're complex machines, and they can't be churned out in the thousands overnight.
In the state that (as of today) has one-third of the country's confirmed COVID-19 cases,
New York governor Andrew Cuomo sounded the alarm for ventilators repeatedly. On March 27, he acknowledged "I don't have a crystal ball" but said his state desperately needed 30,000 ventilators, maybe 40,000, but had only 12,000. When President
Trump noted that Cuomo's state had thousands of unused ventilators it hadn't even placed yet, Cuomo admitted this was true but said he still needed more: "Yes, they're in a stockpile because that's where they're supposed to be because we don't need them yet. We need them for the apex," Cuomo said at the time. On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days "at the current burn rate." But on April 6, Cuomo noted, "We're ok, and we have some in reserve."
Comment: Berlin residents are getting restless as well - hundreds of activists gathered on the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz square in defiance of the Covid-19 lockdown measures, arguing the state is heading for authoritarian rule. The strong police response to the rally underscored their point! Also notable is that the gathering brought people together with very different political views, as banners at the rally ranged from moderate pro-democracy calls to hard-line ones. Earlier this week, the country's Constitutional Court ruled that Germans have the right to hold political protests if they stick to social distancing rules. The Constitutional Court deemed the blanket ban on protests to be unconstitutional, ordering the authorities to review such policies.
The police response:
As people begin asking questions about the extreme response to this 'flu virus' there will likely be many more such rallies in the coming weeks: