The United States is on track to desperately need more ventilators for coronavirus patients in the coming weeks, but, in what feels like a repeat of the failure to test widely for the disease, the head of a ventilator manufacturer says that his company could dramatically increase production—if anyone was placing the needed orders.
“We could increase production five-fold in a 90- to 120-day period,” Chris Kiple, chief executive of Ventec Life Systems, told Forbes. That means “The time for action by the government is now.” And it should be the government, since this is a public health need that isn’t going to be filled by individual hospitals weighing the potential need against their revenues. But we’re talking about the Trump administration, which so far has been fail central when it comes both to anticipating what will be needed to combat the pandemic and to executing its plans.
The massive failure to contain the spread of coronavirus through testing is a great example of what we don't want to happen with the need to stock up on ventilators. The Centers for Disease Control started developing their test quickly when COVID-19’s genome was first published. But the test they eventually shipped around the country was in many cases flawed to the point of being unusable, and it took too long for the government to approve academic labs or private companies to fill the gap. One lab at the University of Washington—near the early epicenter of the disease in the U.S.—started trying to get its own test approved on February 18 but didn’t get that approval until February 29.
The problems weren’t just with availability of tests—though that would have been enough to cause problems. The CDC also imposed tight restrictions on who should be tested, in sharp contrast to South Korea, which tested massive numbers of people in the effort to know the scope of its problem and contain the disease.
The good news is that testing finally seems to be ramping up. But all of the response continues to be overseen by the same dysfunctional White House that has brought us failure after failure in coronavirus response. It’s not just Donald Trump's series of false public statements. It’s the infighting and turf battles among Trump’s top advisers—something he habitually encourages—the lack of aides willing to challenge Trump or give him bad news, and, of course, Jared Kushner’s ability to bigfoot everyone around him despite his lack of public health knowledge or real accomplishments. And it’s the Trump administration that really needs to be stepping up on, for instance, asking ventilator manufacturers to boost production as quickly as they can to alleviate the coming shortages.