‘New Yorkers are generous, and they are grateful and gracious, and when you need help, we will be there for you…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Just a few weeks after demanding tens of thousands of ventilators from the federal government, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the state is giving away its ventilators to states that need them.
Cuomo said during a Wednesday press briefing that New York will be giving 100 ventilators to Michigan and 50 to Maryland, claiming his state has now “stabilized” its health care situation.
“New York had one of the earlier curves,” he explained. “There are other places in this country that are now seeing increases in the death rate.”
New York’s situation over the past two weeks has certainly improved. The number of intensive-care admissions is decreasing, and the number of confirmed cases overall is starting to trend downwards, as well.
But this change in tune could also be due to the fact that Cuomo, like many other governing officials, wildly overestimated the severity of the outbreak.
“What am I going to do with 400 ventilators?” Cuomo asked in late March. “I need 30,000. You pick the 26,000 people who are going to die because you only sent 400 ventilators.”
President Donald Trump had pushed back on Cuomo’s request at the time because he believed “that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to need,” he told Fox News on March 26. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” Trump said.
Even at the coronavirus’s peak in New York, the state was only estimated to need about 6,000 ventilators, according to a model released by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The federal government sent at least 4,000 ventilators to New York, and Cuomo was able to secure another 1,000 from China.
Now, Cuomo is turning his attention to hospitals outside his state.
“I said at the time, New Yorkers are generous, and they are grateful and gracious, and when you need help, we will be there for you,” he said on Wednesday.