On May 1, while Donald Trump was crowing to the nation about his great victory over the novel coronavirus and saying he'd "solved every problem," officials in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) were on a conference call, sharing their concerns over continuing medical equipment shortages and the danger of states reopening too soon. Politico obtained a recording of that grim call.
"We've ensured a ventilator for every patient who needs one," Trump said in his mini-rally. "The testing and the masks and all of the things, we've solved every problem. We solved it quickly." So, Trump said, let's reopen. Meanwhile, Daniel Jernigan, director of the Centers for Disease Control's influenza division, opened the conference call by saying that the "numbers of deaths definitely will be high" with the administration's stay-at-home restrictions expiring. "If, at the end of stay-at-home orders, you were to lift everything and go back to normal business, and not have any community mitigation, you would expect to see in the second week in May we begin to increase again in ventilator uses," another unidentified official said. "Which means cases increase, and by early June, we surpass the number of ventilators we currently have."
Politico obtained three recordings of the daily conference calls between April 24 and May 1. They are information meetings with FEMA and HHS officials around the country, an internal tax force that monitors and tries to shape the government's response to the crisis. Politico says that, in these calls, "officials in Washington and their regional counterparts were blunt about their struggle to keep pace with a flood of requests from governors for more medical equipment, even as the president touted the administration's actions to secure sufficient gear from foreign and domestic producers."
On April 24, the officials discussed a shortage of hospital gowns, with one saying there would be "significant challenge in the days and weeks ahead" and warning they needed a plan for finding "alternatives that can be used in this period of sparse numbers of gowns." That was repeated on May 1. "Our main PPE shortfalls continue to be along the lines of gloves and gowns," an official from FEMA's Region 4, which covers parts of the Southeast, said. "I know everyone is working hard on that."
They don't have tests, either. "Reporting on conversations he'd had with health officials in the mid-Atlantic region, one regional official told the interagency group on April 24 that states' 'supply appears to be the main limiting factor.'" An official representing the Northeastern states said that was the same issue for their region. On May 1, Trump's testing guy, Brett Giroir, joined the conference call to tell them that Jared Kushner's big drive-through test site initiative had been a "great success." It has not. "Funding and staff is not an inhibitor," an official said on April 24 call. "It's the ability to secure testing supplies and PPE."
That May 1 call was optimistically themed "Opening Up America Again," but was primarily focused on the seemingly inevitable fact that states reopening this soon was going to result in new outbreaks that the federal government and states are still not prepared to respond to. Almost all of the regional FEMA representatives said that there were increases in both new cases and deaths in their states even as they were reopening. They flagged prisons, meat-processing plants, and nursing homes among high-risk hot spots where demand for PPE was putting them in competition with hospitals. They discussed the problem of outpatient medical facilities and dentist offices opening, and how that was going to increase demand for mask, gloves, and gowns.
And while Trump was declaring the U.S. "king of the ventilators," they were discussing the new modeling that predicts another ventilator crisis following reopening. There are roughly 104,000 ventilators in the nation's stockpile according to a slide presented in the meeting, with about 30,000 in use right now. There's a surplus now after weeks of everyone staying at home. The model they discussed "illustrated a worst-case scenario that showed the rash of new cases maxing out and soon exceeding the nation's ventilator supplies by the first week of June," Politico reports.
"As we lift mitigation, it's going to be critical to monitor local transmission, public health capacity and health system capacity over time," one official said on May 1, "and if needed, reinitiate mitigation in the coming weeks." That's if they can get Trump to agree, which is looking less likely by the minute. The Trump death cult doesn't care about the body count.