You may have seen this piece floating around yesterday.
It’s now been taken down.
This is why journalists ought not to provide assessments but ask questions of scientists on air, try and read and point — I pointed to offending article— and then rinse, repeat. (And I never want @CT_Bergstrom mad at me.)
The thread is worth reading for the entertainment value alone.
In related developments: projections for New York City are bad. Staggeringly bad. But — at least it’s not climate change.
Landing in the hospital on a ventilator is bad. But worse is being told you can’t have one. After learning that the state’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than New Yorkers would need in a severe pandemic, Gov. Andrew Cuomo came to a fork in the road in 2015. He could have chosen to buy more ventilators. Instead, he asked his health commissioner, Howard Zucker to assemble a task force and draft rules for rationing the ventilators they already had.
That task force came up with rules that will be imposed when ventilators run short. Patients assigned a red code will have the highest access, and other patients will be assigned green, yellow or blue (the worst) depending on a “triage officer’s” decision. In truth, a death officer. Let’s not sugarcoat it. It won’t be up to your own doctor.
Cuomo could have purchased the additional 16,000 needed ventilators for $36,000 apiece or a total of $576 million in 2015. It’s a lot of money but less than the $750 million he threw away on a boondoggle “Buffalo Billion” solar panel factory. When it comes to state budget priorities, spending half a percent of the budget on ventilators is a no brainer.
It’s kind of a New York thing.
In more encouraging news, we may be witnessing the end of the European Union;
With Italy and Spain now bearing the brunt of COVID-19, one member state after another has turned its back on the EU charter, and battened down the hatches against foreigners, including fellow Europeans; sympathy for Syrians and Afghans has had to take a back seat as grandma expires painfully in the back bedroom.
Even Germany has had enough and has closed its border to many of its immediate neighbors, while the Schengen Zone, in which citizens of member states (not all of them in the EU) could travel freely, is now “verboten” to outsiders. So say “auf Wiedersehen” to the European Union as we knew it as the Europeans remember the joys and protective uses of nationalism, and those more interested in national survival than the Brussels pipe dream follow Britain out the door.
When this is over, we need a return to the 1960’s relationship with China.
There is no link, because that’s me talking.
Stay home.
