Cuomo knocks Trump's claim about NY and ventilators

 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cuomo-knocks-trumps-claim-ny-ventilators/story?id=69790191

After New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he needed 30,000 ventilators for the state of New York in order to be prepared for the "apex" of its caseload -- which his team predicted was two to three weeks away -- he criticized the federal government for offering up a fraction of that need.

"FEMA says, 'we're sending 400 ventilators.' Really? What am I going to do with 400 ventilators, when I need 30,000?" Cuomo said at a news conference.

 

Later, Trump announced he would supply another 4,000 ventilators to New York from the national stockpile, but he added a claim that Cuomo had turned down the chance to stock up on thousands of ventilators in 2015. 

"He had a chance to buy -- in 2015 -- 16,000 ventilators at a very low price and he turned it down. I'm not blaming him or anything else. But he shouldn't be talking about us. He's supposed to be buying his own ventilators. We are going to help," Trump said in a Fox News town hall held at the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday.

 Trump appeared to be dramatizing a report from a New York Department of Health task force in 2015 which predicted that, if faced with a pandemic like the 1918 Spanish flu, New York would run into a ventilator shortage to the tune of 15,000. The report was recently resurfaced by Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and supporter of Trump since 2016, who wrote an op-ed about it in the New York Post. Her op-ed was later picked up by the far-right blog Gateway Pundit.

The report, however, did not recommend that New York Health Department should have stocked up on ventilators, nor did it find a low-cost option to do so, as Trump indicated Tuesday. Instead, the 2015 report acknowledged that New York should instead prepare for a moderate scenario and rely on federal resources if faced with a severe scenario.