Do we have enough ventilators for a surge in coronavirus patients?
Tucker Carlson poses the question to coronavirus task force member Seema Verma and Dr. Michael Osterholm.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, joined "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Friday and gave a dire take on the U.S. response to the coronavirus outbreak.
"We are terribly, terribly underprepared for the number of ventilators that will need the circuits, the pieces that connect you to the ventilators," Osterholm said. "We don't have nearly enough respirators."
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Osterholm also shared a harsh critique of Coronavirus Task Force member Seema Verma's responses in a previous segment, calling them "one of the most incompetent and absolutely incoherent responses" he has heard on the outbreak.
"We're in a fight against this virus. We don't have time for double talk. We need straight talk," Osterholm said. "And I think it's time that we say what it is, because, you know what? If we start to see situations like Seattle and what might be happening in Ohio and elsewhere as they start to emerge around the country, that is not a time for us to die trying to figure out that all we were talking about was happy talk."
"We're in a fight against this virus. We don't have time for double talk. We need straight talk."
On Thursday, Fox News' Martha MacCallum had pressed Verma on reports suggesting there was likely to be a shortage of equipment and supplies in hospitals -- including ventilators, beds in intensive care units, and swabs to test patients who may be infected with the virus.
Verma did not answer the question.
"That's not a direct answer to the question," MacCallum said, "but it sounds like a hope that there won't be enough sick people and we won't run out of ventilators because we have mitigated, and we certainly hope -- we certainly hope that is the case."
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Osterholm compared the hospital situation to the military making makeshift facilities in battle.
"We need to understand what we have because we're going to have to plan for it. This is like triage in the military, on the battlefield when you don't have exactly what you need and you've got to deal with what you've got. And we've got to understand that," Osterholm said. "And to try to sit here and paint the fact that somehow we're going to mitigate cases in such a way as to not run into this. We're going to run into it."
Fox News' Yael Halon contributed to this report.
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