With even a little context, it was obvious what Kushner was saying: States shouldn't be drawing on the federal stockpile just to hold ventilators in their own reserves while hard-pressed cities were running low.
The emphasis - with Jared Kushner and his team in the middle of it, and capable leadership from Rear Admiral John Polowczyk at FEMA and Admiral Brett Giroir at HHS - was on data and shrewd allocation, so that ventilators did not go to states simply on request.
The federal government had about 16,000 ventilators on hand in its stockpile and several thousand more from the Veteran's Administration and the Department of Defense.
It became clear that many governors didn't know how many ventilators their states had, and they were driven by early models that were "Doomsday scenarios," as one senior administration official puts it.
It used hospital billings at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to estimate how many ventilators were in each state and how many were being utilized on any day, giving administration officials a more granular picture of what was happening in states than many governors had themselves.
If the administration had tried to fulfill New York's initial stated need for 40,000 ventilators, everything would have gone out the door to New York, and for no good reason.
Last year, according to administration figures, the country produced 30,000 ventilators.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-ventilators-trump-administration-handled-potential-shortage-deftly/
The emphasis - with Jared Kushner and his team in the middle of it, and capable leadership from Rear Admiral John Polowczyk at FEMA and Admiral Brett Giroir at HHS - was on data and shrewd allocation, so that ventilators did not go to states simply on request.
The federal government had about 16,000 ventilators on hand in its stockpile and several thousand more from the Veteran's Administration and the Department of Defense.
It became clear that many governors didn't know how many ventilators their states had, and they were driven by early models that were "Doomsday scenarios," as one senior administration official puts it.
It used hospital billings at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to estimate how many ventilators were in each state and how many were being utilized on any day, giving administration officials a more granular picture of what was happening in states than many governors had themselves.
If the administration had tried to fulfill New York's initial stated need for 40,000 ventilators, everything would have gone out the door to New York, and for no good reason.
Last year, according to administration figures, the country produced 30,000 ventilators.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-response-ventilators-trump-administration-handled-potential-shortage-deftly/
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