New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he plans to sign an executive order that would allow the state government to take personal protective equipment and ventilators from hospitals with less need and redeploy them to areas harder hit by the coronavirus outbreak.
The governor said he has spoken with hospital administrators and understands the reluctance to give up essential equipment, but that he wants to avoid a situation where COVID-19 patients are dying in one part of the state while ventilators sit unused in another part of the state.
"The theory is that if the government gets them, they will never get them back. I understand that, but I don't have an option," Cuomo said.
The move marks an expansion of a broader effort to coordinate the state's patchwork of regional health systems and public and private hospitals. The state is surveying hospitals nightly to determine case-loads, personnel needs, and inventories of needed medical supplies.
"Those institutions will either get their ventilator back or they will be reimbursed and paid for their ventilator so they can buy a new ventilator," the governor said. "I can't do anything more than that."
Several hundred ventilators could be shifted from upstate to downstate New York, according to Cuomo, though the exact amount remains to be determined. He said he's banking on hospitals' goodwill and pushed back against the use of the word "seize" in describing the policy.
"First of all, don't use the word seize," he said. "That's a harsh kind of word. It's sharing of resources. We're not going to have any part of the state not have the resources we need because we didn't share resources."
Cuomo also announced that the 2,500-bed emergency field hospital at the Javits Center in Manhattan will transition into treating COVID-19 patients. It was formerly intended as an overflow hospital for non-COVID cases, but there hasn't been enough demand for those cases.
"As it turned out, we don't have non-COVID people to any great extent in the hospitals," he said. "Hospitals have now turned into, effectively, ICU hospitals for COVID patients."
He said that the general shutdown of the state economy has led to a downturn in other types of medical needs, due to a drop in automobile-related injuries, violent crimes, and other incidents.
The latest numbers on the outbreak include 102,836 total cases, 14,810 hospitalizations, and more than 2,900 deaths, up from 2,300 deaths, which Cuomo called the "highest single increase in the number of deaths since we started."
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President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladmir Putin are expected to have another conversation surrounding escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Ariel Cohen, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, joined Cheddar's Ken Buffa to discuss the ongoing tensions and why Putin's request for a conversation with Biden comes now. "This is very serious. This is the worst security crisis we had since the collapse of the Soviet Union," Cohen told Cheddar.
Stocks closed mixed on Wednesday, but two indexes - the Dow and the S&P 500 - ended the session with a new record. Akshata Bailkeri, Equity Analyst at Bruderman Asset Management, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where she says there is a consensus for robust consumer spreading in 2022, especially as the Omicron variant is proving to be milder than other COVID-19 strains.
John Quelch, Dean of Miami Herbert Business School, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he says the retail giant is acting in accordance to President Biden's new law banning goods from China's Xinjiang region. Quelch also elaborates on the importance of China in Walmart's overall strategy.
