New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference alongside the National Guard at the Jacob Javits Center that will house a temporary hospital in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Monday, March 23, 2020, in New York. New York City hospitals are just 10 days from running out of “really basic supplies,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Sunday. De Blasio has called upon the federal government to boost the city’s quickly dwindling supply of protective equipment. The city also faces a potentially deadly dearth of ventilators to treat those infected by the coronavirus. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Imagine someone comes into your place of business, robs you, kills an employee or two, sets all your sh** on fire and then offers you a glass of water and a box of Band-Aids to repair the damage. What do you do? Well, if you are New York Governor Andrew Cuomo you take the gift and publicly fellate thank your benefactor.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced during a COVID-19 briefing Saturday that the state will accept 1,000 ventilators from Chinese donors.

“We finally got some good news today,” Cuomo said during the briefing. “The Chinese government helped facilitate a donation of 1,000 ventilators that will arrive in JFK today.”

The donations come from several Chinese foundations facilitated by Ambassador Huang Ping.

Jack Ma, Joe Tsai, the Jack Ma Foundation and the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation contributed to bring the massive stock of ventilators to New York.

“I want to thank Ambassador Huang very much for his help in making all of this happen because this is a big deal, and it’s going to make a significant difference for us,” Cuomo said.

There is so much wrong here that one doesn’t even know where to start…but, being ever the optimist, I’m willing to give it a go.

First and foremost, there is no documented need for this equipment in New York. We know that New York has a few thousand ventilators stockpiled

So blowhard @NYGovCuomo has been crying on TV for over a week about needing 30,000 ventilators. Investigative journalist fins 4000 ventilators in a warehouse in NY. NY medical professions admit they have approximately 1500 patients currently on ventilators. pic.twitter.com/4FZxaSZPPZ

— Roscoe B Davis🎖⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@RoscoeBDavis1) March 28, 2020

(Snopes, bless their nasty, corrupt, shriveled little souls, has fact checked this claim as “false” by adding into it the modifier that the ventilators were stockpiled to make the New York crisis worse. So you Facebook fact checkers, just FOAD.)

There are 8,200 people in the US who are rated in serious-to-critical condition with Wuhnan virus. Most of those do not require ventilators. It is entirely possible that New York has enough ventilators, itself, to serve the needs of the entire nation.

Second, there is scant evidence that this equipment is even usable. There is a limited number of medical personnel qualified to manage patients using respirators and they are limited to the number of such patients they can monitor at one time (I’ve seen the number “two” bandied about, I don’t know if that is the case). Assuming you need three people (24-hours in a day) per ventilator grouping it is easy to see how you quickly run out of trained staff long before you run out of respirators. And if some of those people you were counting on were members of the Reserve Component of the US military, they may now be napping aboard a hospital ship in Los Angeles or playing a delightful game of cornhole (no, the other kind) near a field hospital in Washington. [READ: So Far the Navy Hospital Ships Have Treated 18 Patients and the People Who Caused This Frenzy Must Be Held Accountable]

Third, playing along with a cheap propaganda stunt perpetrated by the Chinese government is simply unconscionable.The Chinese government, which might as well have deliberately caused this pandemic, has been playing at benevolent benefactor to nations hit hard by the Wuhan virus as a way of stamping out any international call to hold China accountable.

Foreign Policy:

Meanwhile, China has dispatched medical supplies and a few medical staff, too. Chinese authorities made a big deal out a March 12 flight that carried—as announced by Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio—31 tons of equipment, including 40 ventilators. Since the initial flight, the Chinese have sent a few more supplies, including 30 ventilators on March 25. But for Italy, where nearly 100,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus and more than 10,000 have been killed by it, that’s a drop in the bucket.

Were the Chinese true friends of Italy, they would have sent tens of thousands of ventilators. What’s more, the Chinese supplies weren’t exactly a charitable gift. While some came from the Chinese Red Cross, the Italians had to buy others. To add insult to injury, around the same time that the first flight arrived, Chinese state media outlets began circulating a rumor that the COVID-19 outbreak had actually originated in Italy.

China has sent supplies to other countries, too. The deliveries are, however, paltry for a government with massive manufacturing at its disposal and whose bungling of the initial outbreak led to the virus going global. A million face masks here, a few hundred thousand there, and a few doctors are not much for a country that accounted for 50 percent of global face mask production in 2019 and whose daily face mask production skyrocketed to an astounding 110 million in February. By contrast, Albania, a poor country with fewer than 3 million inhabitants, has sent the Italians 30 doctors and nurses.

The best you can say about this is that this is a craven attempt by Cuomo to impress upon the Chinese government that he doesn’t hold the current crisis against them. You can nearly count on Cuomo’s staff and their fluffers in the media to start claiming that the ChiComs have been more generous to New York than the Trump administration.

Fourth, the ventilators may or may not be legal for use. Unless the model has been certified by the FDA as safe (and while I’m very critical of the bureaucratic nonsense the FDA pulls in some regards, the last thing we need is unsafe medical equipment entering the US from what appears to be an enemy nation in large quantities) it is going to set in a bonded warehouse until someone gets around to certifying it. This, of course, will be manna from Heaven to Fredo and Tater and the rest of the braintrust at CNN: Trump prevents ventilators from reaching dying New Yorkers.

Fifth, there is a better than even chance that the stuff does not work.

BBC:

Thousands of testing kits and medical masks are below standard or defective, according to authorities in Spain, Turkey and the Netherlands.

…
On Saturday, the Dutch health ministry announced it had recalled 600,000 face masks. The equipment had arrived from a Chinese manufacturer on 21 March, and had already been distributed to front-line medical teams.

China is dumping nominal quantities of cheap trash onto vulnerable nations as a gimmick in a shameful public relations campaign. Cuomo has signed on to not only to allow New York to be a part of it but to cut a video message thanking the Chinese for giving him nothing of value.

A side note: you can bet that none of the media toads who were squirting blood from their whatever over a Christian businessman retooling his production facility to produce medical supplies being publicly thanked by President Trump will twitch a unibrow at Andrew Cuomo thanking a murderous, thuggish regime for shipping him equipment that he doesn’t appear to need and probably will not work.