Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, D-Bronx, doesn’t want to see New York state be short of ventilators in the future.

Arroyo introduced A.10186 in the state Assembly on Tuesday requiring the state Health Department to prepare a report every other year on the number of available ventilators at each hospital in the state and to make recommendations on the number of ventilators needed to meet the needs of a pandemic or regional disease outbreak.

The report would be required to include the age and life span of all ventilators, recommendations of how much state funding would be needed to buy new ventilators to replace out-of-date, non-functioning or poorly functioning ventilators; recommend funding needed to meet the state’s ventilator needs if a pandemic, epidemic or disease outbreak occurs; recommendations on the number of hospital staff necessary to operate the ventilators in each hospital; and recommendations for training hospital staff to adequately operate the ventilators.

Arroyo said she wants to use the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to examine the state’s preparedness for the future. “The (state) Department of Health has been aware of this problem for over 13 years and has addressed the situation by issuing guidelines to health-care facilities on how to ration access to ventilators and also provided guidelines on who can be denied access in the case of mass demand for ventilator therapy,” Arroyo wrote in her legislative justification. “These guidelines require each hospital to create a triage officer or triage committee which will determine who will live and who will die based on a lengthy set of criteria. This is unacceptable in a state with a gross state ‘ product of over $1.6 trillion annually and a combined yearly state and local government budgets of close to $200 billion.”

The lack of ventilators has been a constant issue during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly called for President Donald Trump to invoke the Federal Defense Production Act to require the nation’s manufacturers to produce ventilators.

On Tuesday, Cuomo said the state has found about 7,000 ventilators, but still needs 30,000 ventilators.

“You cannot buy them,” Cuomo said Tuesday during his daily press briefing. “You cannot find them. Every state is trying to get them, other countries are trying to get them. The capacity is limited. They’re technical pieces of equipment. They’re not manufactured in two days or four days, seven days or 10 days. So, this is a critical and desperate need for ventilators. We’re going so far as to you trying experimental procedure where we split the ventilator. We use one ventilator for two patients. Its difficulty to perform. It’s experimental, but at this point we have no alternatives. We’re working on this experimental application taking two people in beds, one ventilator between the two of them, but with two sets of tubes two sets of pipes going to the two patients.”

Over the weekend, former state Lt. Gov. Betsy McGaughey wrote an opinion piece in the New York Post that referenced a decision state officials made in 2015 after discovering New York needed 16,000 ventilators to meet the need of a severe pandemic. It was estimated then that it would cost $576 million to purchase the ventilators. Rather than purchase ventilators then, the decision was made to assign codes for patients who would have the highest priority for ventilators if there weren’t enough for everyone who needed them.

According to FoxNews.com, President Trump referenced the report on Tuesday, saying during a Fox News town hall on the coronavirus that Cuomo could have purchased ventilators over the past five years and chose not to do so. Dani Lever, a spokesperson for Cuomo, was quoted by FoxNews.com as saying the president obviously hadn’t read the task force report. Lever said the task force never recommended buying ventilators at the time and merely referenced that New York wouldn’t have enough ventilators for a 1918 flu pandemic.