Trump administration officials opened the briefing today by announcing that the U.S. will move to enhance their counternarcotics operation to fight Mexican cartels seeking to “exploit the pandemic to threaten American lives.” Roughly half an hour into the briefing, Trump turned his attention to the virus and assured the public that officials are quickly moving to resolve the issue of ventilators.
“We’re soon going to have more ventilators than we need,” the president said. “We’re building thousands of ventilators right now. It takes a period of time to build them. And again, nobody could have known anything like this could happen.”
Trump reiterated that thousands were being built, without specifying a figure. “We will fairly soon be at a point where we have far more than we can use even, even after we stockpile for some future catastrophe, which we hope doesn’t happen,” he continued.
The additional ventilators that are not needed domestically will be distributed around the world to countries such as Italy, France and Spain, the president added.
The U.S. is struggling to source enough protective gear for its citizens as COVID-19 continues to rapidly spread, claiming hundreds of lives each passing day. Trump said the federal stockpile of personal protective equipment (PPE) is nearly empty “because we’re sending it directly to hospitals.”
Newsweek reached out to the White House for comment.
Ventilators help to support a patient’s breathing when their lungs cannot do its work by controlling oxygen and air flow. With the coronavirus pandemic rapidly accelerating in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has pleaded for 30,000 ventilators amid fears of an imminent shortage.
Medical experts countrywide also share Cuomo’s fears of a ventilator shortage amid the unpredictable pandemic. The Society of Critical Care Medicine projected that as many as 960,000 domestic COVID-19 patients may need to use a ventilator sometime during the outbreak, but the organization estimates only around 200,000 of these devices exist in the U.S. Of those, they say that roughly half are older models that may not be reliable for critically-ill individuals. Many ventilators are also still being used for non-coronavirus patients.
Trump invoked his Defense Production Act powers last Friday to order General Motors to begin production on ventilators.
On Wednesday afternoon, the number of global coronavirus cases surpassed 900,000, with at least 46,000 deaths and 193,000 recoveries.
The U.S. is now the country with the highest number of cases with more than 213,000 testing positive for the coronavirus, an increase of nearly 23,000 from Tuesday.
