A bipartisan group of lawmakers and officials in upstate New York criticized New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for scheduling the state’s National Guard deployment to seize medical equipment from their regional hospitals to send to the New York City area.
“We are aware of plans to shift ventilators from our upstate communities and are gravely concerned. Health care access in rural communities has long been under strain, and we know the apex of cases in upstate is around the corner,” the New York officials wrote Cuomo on Sunday in a joint statement as the coronavirus in New York state threatened to reach its peak. “We stand ready to help our fellow New Yorkers, but moving needed ventilators from our region now would be devastating and counter intuitive to all data on the spread of COVID-19.”
On Friday, Cuomo announced a plan that would mandate that hospitals around the state send their ventilators to New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the region. Cuomo has not signed the executive order to do so, but he plans to in the coming days.
Over 93% of the 102,863 confirmed COVID-19 cases in New York are in New York City, Nassau, Rockland, Suffolk, and Westchester counties. There are 14,810 patients in hospitals with 3,731 in intensive care units. Most are located in downstate hospitals.
“All we’re asking for is ventilators you’re not using now and you don’t foresee using in the foreseeable future,” Cuomo said Sunday at his daily briefing, adding that the state was only “borrowing” these ventilators.
“We won’t lose a life if we can prevent it, and we won’t lose a life because we didn’t share resources among ourselves,” he said.
On a conference call with Cuomo and state Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker, hospital executives were asked to loan the state between 10 to 20% of spare ventilators and personal protective equipment.
However, local and state lawmakers do not trust that the ventilators Cuomo plans to take from their regions will ever be returned.
“Once they are taken we will not get them back when we need them, and clearly none are available for purchase. We want to help, but if we hit our peak while our resources are elsewhere, Erie County residents will die. We cannot let that happen,” Republican lawmakers in the Erie County Legislature said in a statement to Congress.
Rep. Brian Higgins, a Democrat representing the Buffalo area, called the proposal to take the ventilators “unacceptable.”
“The concept of National Guard troops taking custody of ventilators, personal protective equipment and other resources from Western New York is unacceptable,” Higgins wrote in a statement.
“My staff and I are speaking directly to healthcare executives throughout Western New York on a near-hourly basis. They tell us that chronic shortages of supplies and equipment, including resources for testing for COVID-19 still remain,” he added.
