A 2006 pandemic plan warned that New York City could be short as many as 9,500 ventilators. But the city only acquired a few hundred, which were ultimately scrapped because it couldn’t afford to maintain them. In July 2006, with an aggressive and novel strain of the flu circulating in Asia and the Middle East, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a sweeping pandemic preparedness plan. Using computer models to calculate how a disease could spread rapidly through the city’s five boroughs, experts concluded New York needed a substantial stockpile of both masks and ventilators. If the city confronted...