Posted on 03/13/2020 10:41:05 PM PDT by rintintin
Thursday night Seema Verma, one of the top members of the White House coronavirus task force and the current head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, repeatedly dodged when Fox News’ Martha MacCallum grilled her over possible ventilator shortages.
Tucker Carlson was so stunned by that exchange he invited Verma on his show Friday night and opened by saying, “I watched that exchange last night, and I must be honest with you, I was really troubled by it. Because you were asked a direct question by Martha MacCallum, ‘do we have enough ventilators in ICU units,’ and you appeared to intentionally not answer it, so I’m going to ask you that question again and hope that we will be reassured by the answer. Do we have enough ventilators to treat a surge in cases coronavirus right now, do you believe?”
“We have stockpile of ventilators. So right now today we are able to address people that need ventilators,” Verma said. “Our strategy though is to not make the situation worse, but there is a stockpile of ventilators. The president talked about ventilators today and said we’re going to purchase more to make sure that we have that backup supply.”
Carlson pressed on specifics, asking, “Can you put some meat on those bones and give us a sense of how many ventilators are in place? How many are in the stockpile? How many do you think we will need?”
(Excerpt) Read more at mediaite.com ...
From everything we’ve read so far about China, Italy and countries hardest hit by this, no one has enough ventilators. It would be impossible to have thousands and thousands stockpiled. For cryin out loud.
I don't think at this point it matters. Clearly it's not just affecting asians. It's here, it's spreading. And we have started taking action to stop the spread with even cancellations and school closures, but we don't have a handle on it yet and there's a lot of denial out there.
Sometimes Tucker is an idiot.
How can she know? No one knows what the progression will be. COVID-19 is a living organism interacting with other living organisms not an equation she or anyone else can solve.
Tucker has many good moments but he seems very ivory tower and oblivious to the downside of his insistence Veema speculate about worst case. How is attacking and destroying this woman’s credibility over a question, no one can answer honestly, and which requires panic generating speculation, going to help America through this crisis? We could never have enough ICU beds for every individual in the USA if they require them at the same time & that is the endpoint of Tucker’s question.
Tom Hanks is also over 60 AND has diabetes he and his wife are doing great!!
Unless I heard wrong, the next guest who criticized her said we have 160,000 ventilators and 9000 in reserve.
You can find every Tucker Carlson show on Youtube but you have to be quick about it. I live in Spain, which is 6 hours ahead of EST so when I wake up in the morning Tucker, Hannity, Laurah Ingraham are all on Youtube. By lunchtime, when Americans are starting to wake up, everything but monologue summaries have been deleted. Someone already posted a link for you but if you go there and find that the show is less than 10 seconds long the censors have beat you to it. The best thing to do is get yourself a Youtube video downloading program (do a search for free ones), download the shows while they are still there and watch them at your convenience. That’s what I do ever day.
Both Tucker and Martha were disappointing.
I agree with you. It is a stupid question. You won’t know if you don’t have enough until you need them all.
I hear ya’... and Trish hasn’t disappointed.
Subtract one for me, I don’t want no stinkin’ ventilator. Let nature take her course.
Instead you should be telling Tucker that he is feeding the panic. If he had asked how many ICU beds the US has and the number stockpiled she could have answered. In fact he could have looked it up as could you.
I posted those numbers as of a recent assessment on FR in the last few days. Likewise I posted estimates on how long to add capacity.
It’s easily available by searching on the web. CDC & NH have those statistics. But that doesn’t answer the gottcha question because we do not have crystal balls and no number of ICU/ventilator equip beds is “enough”.
USA ICU bed/100K population (34/100K), is the highest in the world. Our ICU bed tally was enough for past pandemics. That fact still doesn’t answer the question. The question as asked is unanswerable and only a fool or someone who wanted to watch someone squirm to feel important, would have asked the question Tucker repeated. Someone who didn’t think needlessly destroying the credibility of a woman who is part of the task mattered as much as his ego.
If the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, which is very true since panic destroys our ability to follow guidelines and stop community spread, then Tucker fed the enemy.
Americans are incredibly innovative. If we need more someone will invent something out of nothing that will work. The best thing about Trump is he reminded us of what we are and what we can do. I’m not worried.
Italy has the highest average age population in Europe by several years. They were seeded with COVID-19 all at once by a large infected population of workers who had gone home to Wuhan and returned after the holiday; at least 10% of the Italian garment industry are Chinese workers. There was a second large seeding when Chinese tourist attended the February fashion shows.
That seeding does not cause a normal exponential spread. It’s like super-innoculating a petri dish. Italy also has the lowest number of ventilators/100K population in Europe, ~1/3 of the US supply (12.5/100K population).
We are not going to have a growth of infection like Italy.
ICU beds are not equal to ventilators.
This particular disease creates a high demand for ventilators.
And we might have the most ICU beds in the world. But that doesn’t mean we have enough ventilators. This is a once in 100 years disease.
we’ll be looking at 6 to 8% deaths like Italy.
30 posted on 3/14/2020, 2:22:37 AM by DannyTN
Bet you $10,000.00 you are wrong.
The statistics are ICU beds equip with ventilation capacity as I stated. So your question contains incorrect assumptions. You need to stop panicking. We have no idea if this disease will be more than a blip on the pandemic screen let alone the worst this century. Stop listening to the MSM whose business is creating panic & generating viewers & clicks.
Start doing some of the math on actual infection rate.. Divide the population of a given country by the total infections in that country to discover that infection rate is ~0.1% in China where there are now fewer & fewer new infections/day. The totals will rise more before all of the world is in the recovery stage but a reasonable assumption is that only 5% of cases will be serious (China 1 in 20 & Italy, the worst case, is 1/17 seriously sick) and of those seriously ill many but not all will require mechanical ventilation.
Tucker is playing the gotcha game.
I don’t listen to MSM.
I’ve been following this story, and analyzing the numbers since early January.
This is a serious disease. Dr. Fouci was correct when he said it’s 10 times as lethal as the flu, and appears to be spread at least as easily. Although he might be low.
I was stating it was at least 10 times more lethal for weeks before he said it.
Deaths per population is meaningless at this point. If you were any good at math, you would know that. Of course you could just be dishonest and know that your math is misleading.
The disease is too new. Case fatality rate is important. Spread rate is important. Those two tell you the potential. Deaths per population will be important only after it’s widespread and you can compare full seasons to existing diseases like the flu.
And as far as Italy, if you take the deaths plus the serious cases divided by the number of known cases you get 15.3%.
It’s 15% not 5% that will be seriously ill. Of course if you let the healthcare system get overwhelmed, and people die, that does reduce the percent that are seriously ill.
Feeling schooled yet?
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