President Donald Trump told Fox News host and unofficial presidential adviser Sean Hannity on Tuesday night that he had learned partly from the prime-time star’s show just how “great” things are with ventilators and vital medical supplies during the coronavirus pandemic. Insisting that the nation is close to the peak of coronavirus cases, Trump said he “was right” that states wouldn’t need nearly as many beds and ventilators as originally thought.
“In fact, we just saw your show and a couple of other people just reported back to me that everyone is in great shape from the standpoint of ventilators which are very hard because they were expensive and big and they are very high tech,” Trump declared. “But they are very hard to get and we are building thousands of them, and we have that in good shape.”
As COVID-19 cases began to spike in New York and other states, governors began sounding the alarm on the need for ventilators and masks as hospitals began experiencing shortages. At one point, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state would need at least 30,000 ventilators from the federal government or other sources. Recently, California loaned 500 ventilators to the national stockpile in an effort to help harder hit states like New York, prompting Cuomo to express thanks as his state is still “beyond capacity.”
