It is the “cruelest irony” that the US has been forced to seek coronavirus supplies from China — where the disease first exploded in late 2019 — Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday.
“I don’t have a New York Defense Production Act,” Cuomo said during an Albany press briefing, referring to the law the president can invoke to compel private companies to manufacture needed supplies.
“The governor can’t say to a company, ‘We need you to manufacture this,'” he said. “It is the cruelest irony that this nation is now dependent on China for production of many of these products.”
Highly coveted products like medical gowns and ventilators were largely manufactured in China prior to the outbreak, and American companies have been slow to address the demand, forcing the US to continue relying on the Asian powerhouse.
Though he has no power to mandate production, Cuomo enticed American business owners to consider the money to be made — and made clear that he’d be first in line to pay.
“I ask businesses just to think about the situation we’re in and a possible opportunity,” he said. “If you are a manufacturer who can convert to make these products and make them quickly … we will purchase them, and we will pay a premium, and we will pay to convert or transition your manufacturing facility to a facility that can do this.”
With the worst of the contagion bearing down, however, Cuomo stressed that time is of the essence.
“We need it, like, now. We’re not talking about two months, three months, four months,” he said. “We need these materials now.”
Ventilators, as Cuomo has repeatedly stressed, are at a particular premium.
“At the current burn rate, we have about six days of ventilators in our stockpile,” said Cuomo. “Meaning if the rate of usage, the rate of people coming into hospitals who need ventilators, if that rate continues, in our stockpile we have about six days.
“If the apex happens within that timeframe, if the apex increases, if the apex is longer, we have an issue with ventilators.”
The state on Wednesday night released from its stockpile 400 ventilators to New York City’s overtaxed public hospital system, and 200 to Long Island and Westchester, where confirmed cases have also been mounting.
President Trump has repeatedly criticized New York for amassing federal supply caches in a New Jersey warehouse, and tweeted Thursday that “complainers should have been stocked up and ready long before this crisis hit.”
Cuomo has countered that it makes perfect sense to pool supplies in a central stockpile, from which they can be doled out locally as needed.