In 2015, a New York state task force predicted that an influenza pandemic as serious as the 1918 Spanish flu would mean a severe shortfall in ventilators for thousands of hospitalized patients who needed help breathing.
The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law said a model based on the 1918 pandemic indicated there would be more than 800,000 hospital admissions in the state, and 90,000 of those patients would need ventilators.
The task force discovered that were 7,250 ventilators in New York hospitals and about 1,900 in nursing homes – with most of them already in use. Even with the state’s own stockpile, that task force said there was only 2,800 total ventilators available, despite health officials’ warnings that a major outbreak could require 18,600 New Yorkers to be on the machines each week during the crisis’ peak.
Instead of buying the ventilators in 2015, the task force created a priority system for who would be put on a ventilator – red being the most dire, blue being the least – and assigned a triage officer, or “death panel” as Trump said, to make the life-or-death decisions.
