"We're still collating."
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 ...
You’re speaking to the futility of nailing down an exact number of required ventilators.
100% political and ginned up to the max.
The fear mongering is pathetic as are the pearl cltuching Henny Pennies here on FR.
Tell me again how many have contracted the flu so far? The regular flu not this coronavirus? Milliona and millions with 1000’s dead right here and not a peep from the press or handwringers.
Death rate? No one has a clue what that is and it is totally unknowable. I have seen numbers from almost 4% all the way down to .3%.
Swine flu was ignored even after obumbler declared a state of emergency.
Anyone who can’t see the politics in the reporting of this flu is plain ignorant.
A range would fine. And educated estimate would help.
Number of ventilators is a critical item of preparation. Why would we throw our hands up and say we don't know or it doesn't matter.
We're not France. We fight. (And yes, France said early on that there was community spread and there was no point in quarantines. They surrendered.)
We've got more than a few Frooges on this site. "Let the eater elderly die and decrease the population" - Freeping Scrooges. Not saying you are. But it's the only reason I can think for not putting up a fight. For not recognizing the seriousness of this disease. For not trying to be prepared.
If we could ramp up producing planes and tanks during WWII why can’t we do the same with ventilators?
Nope.
Why not?
Made in China. That is why.
But could change overnight. And it should.
The Chinese were using this is opportunity to try and force a win in the trade war after they already lost it.
Anyone that tries to tell you otherwise is either ignorant or lying
We’re going to need them for the next pandemic, even if they won’t be needed for this one.
>> Why would we throw our hands up and say we don’t know or it doesn’t matter?
That wasn’t Tucker’s question.
Of course there is a finite number of ventilators. Ventilators don’t grow on trees. And nobody knows how many they will need. We dont know how many people will be infected. We don’t know how many people will need a ventilator. So asking, “do we have enough?” is not a question that can be answered by anyone.
I don’t think Tucker would be happy with any answer. Because if she answered with a range, he’d then have a doctor on that would disagree with the range given. No one has any idea how bad this outbreak will be.
Ultimately....Do we have enough hospital beds? No. we don’t. Neither does Europe. No one does. That’s why Italy is totally f****ed. But this has been a problem for a long, long time. We don’t have enough doctors or nurses either. We don’t have a million doctors on reserve that can just be called up in a time of crisis like soldiers. No country does. China had to create makeshift hospitals using tents and force businesses to close and force workers to volunteer for healthcare work.
So what answer do you want? No country’s healthcare system is prepared to be flooded by millions of people in a short time period. None! And screaming it every single night on cable news and creating panic isn’t helping anyone.
We’re going to have to assume something like this is going to happen every ten years or so. It’s like planning for Hurricane season, it just comes from having a mobile world.
I don’t know why everyone is freaking out about this virus that may kill lots of ppl. According to the Democrats, the world is gonna end by 2030 if we don’t institute the Green New Deal. Well that’s going nowhere apparently, so I guess we’re all gonna die in the next 10 years. The way I look at it, the ppl dying because of CV-19 are just going a little early; the rest of us will follow within a decade. So everyone needs to just chill out. /s
It is the most obvious and reasonable question to ask. They acknowledge trying to flatten the curve to minimize an overflooding of patients to critical resources, which most clearly includes ventilators in ICUs.
So appropriate questions to ask the guv are how much of a surge can our system handle and what are they doing—and have they done—in the months to hear about this impending pandemic with acute respiratory distress as its most critical symptom, to make sure we have a sufficient supply.
They are ready to throw billions around now, but what could a billion or two have done to increase that supply over the last 10 weeks—and what could a further all out effort, with big cash, could do for that now?
And are we doing that now? Those are the questions to ask. Saying that they are not getting great demand from hospitals for that right now is not an answer. Saying that they need to look for hospitals to tell them what the demand will be is a bogus answer.
I hope they keep being asked more directly. Fauci and Bix(sp?) danced around the question yesterday, which was a big red flag.
There is a story on the NY Post about Kushner being in charge of the effort behind the scenes—and asking his brother’s wife’s father, a nonspecialist physician, what the priorities should be. He went to Facebook to ask his nonspecialist physician and general contacts and reportedly the list he came up with did not include this.
I ask the question, did we have enough airplanes tanks and military hardware when we entered the war with Germany and japan? no. we put our a##es to the grinder and got to work. Lets purchase an abundance of ventilator to stockpile for decades and then bring these expired old ventilators out of mothballs dust them off and realize they are useless because they are now obsolete, come on tucker I like you but Im getting a bit irritated
Plus, we don’t need people showing up demanding to be put on one if they don’t need it.
"We're still collating."
Agree. ...I thought Tucker was being snarky, like Wallace, and demanding a specific answer when the need is unknown.
Thumbs up!
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