I’m an engineer too and I’ve gotten frustrated by the fact that people are getting all up in arms and forming strong opinions when in fact we are in a situation where to tell the truth “nobody knows nothing”. The facts and data change by the day, if not hour, for example for the last month we’ve been hearing “why don’t we have enough ventilators? If we’d taken this seriously in January we could have built 10s of thousands of ventilators and headed off this problem!
The one fact we can all understand is that there is no cure for this virus and that if you get it, you could die. I'll refer you to the animated graph I posted earlier. Watch our number of cases go up from March 10 to now. If you need evidence of how serious this situation is here in our country, that would be it. In one month we went from a couple thousand cases to a half million. That's not just in one locale either, it's everywhere including rural areas.
The arguments about equipment are real. Now, no one place needs 30,000 ventilators all at one time but there very well may be more populated places that need 15 to 20K. You are correct that these things don't grow on trees. But, if there was a federally coordinated system that could verify nationwide inventory and then facilitate quick distribution to the places that need them most, don't you think that would be worthwhile? It would definitely help to ease people's minds (both medical and patients) to know that should the need arise, they will be taken care of.
The PPE stuff is also a really bad situation. The government could have asked our biggest manufacturers that make any number of other things to tool up and start making gowns, masks gloves visors etc. Some have stepped up voluntarily but if it was a federal mandate to start making this stuff so our medical care personnel can do their job without worrying about getting infected, things might look a little different and the hysteria over all this equipment might be a little less worrisome. Save for ventilators, masks, gowns, gloves etc. are generally single use only but the medical care people and first repsonders are being put into a situation where they have to re-use this stuff sometimes for days and weeks. Having that stuff readily available would prevent some number of new infections.
For me, the major problem with this epidemic is that there was straight up denial at the highest level of government for weeks while the virus spread unchecked. It's hard to say what could have or should have been done but one has to imagine that pushing the idea that this was something that wouldn't affect us was a gross miscalculation and irresponsible to say the least.
