President Trump on Thursday downplayed the number of ventilators he thinks New York will need in the battle against the coronavirus.
“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump said in a call to Fox News’ “Hannity.”
“I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” Trump continued. “You know you go into major hospitals sometimes they’ll have two ventilators and now, all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has requested 30,000 of the machines. On Tuesday, the governor blasted the federal government for only sending a sliver of what he anticipates the Empire State will need to deal with the crisis.
“You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators?” a furious Cuomo said, during a press conference, adding that tens of thousands of New Yorkers were “going to die” unless Trump and the feds up the ante on the ventilators they promised.
Speaking to Sean Hannity, Trump said that purchasing a ventilator was like buying a car, calling it “very expensive” and “very intricate.”
“And you know they’d say, like Gov. Cuomo and others, they’d say we want 30,000 of them. Thirty thousand?” Trump said. “Think of this, you know you go to hospitals that have one in a hospital and now all of a sudden everyone’s asking for these vast numbers.”
“Look it’s a very bad situation,” he added. “We haven’t seen anything like it but the end result is we gotta get back to work, and I think we can start by opening up some parts of the country.”
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