Apr 15, 2020 - Health

Hospitals to share ventilators while production scales up

Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

The Trump administration and 20 major health care systems launched a new ventilator loan program that will allow hospitals to ship unused machines to areas where they are needed most to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

Why it matters: The "dynamic ventilator reserve" program will help hospitals deal with a shortage of the life-saving machines while private industry scrambles to crank up production.

Driving the news: The ventilator loan program announced at Tuesday's White House coronavirus briefing is something that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had been pushing for weeks as conditions worsened in New York City.

  • Cuomo said New York needed 40,000 ventilators to meet surge demand, and begged other states to send their unused machines, saying he would personally drive them back when the state's peak had passed.

The big picture: Trump has enlisted automakers and other companies to increase ventilator production to replenish U.S. stockpiles.

  • The U.S. will manufacture 150,000 to 200,000 ventilators by the end of the year — "far more than we'll ever need" — up from 30,000 last year, the president said.
  • Currently, there are about 10,000 ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile, "ready to move, should we need them," he said.

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Louisville officer: "Breonna Taylor would be alive" if we had served no-knock warrant

Breonna Taylor memorial in Louisville. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, the Louisville officer who led the botched police raid that caused the death of Breonna Taylor, said the No. 1 thing he wishes he had done differently is either served a "no-knock" warrant or given five to 10 seconds before entering the apartment: "Breonna Taylor would be alive, 100 percent."

Driving the news: Mattingly, who spoke to ABC News and Louisville's Courier Journal for his public interview, was shot in the leg in the initial moments of the March 13 raid. Mattingly did not face any charges after Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said he and another officer were "justified" in returning fire to protect themselves against Taylor's boyfriend.

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2 hours ago - Technology

U.S. vs. Google — the siege begins

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

The Justice Department fired the starter pistol on what's likely to be a years-long legal siege of Big Tech by the U.S. government when it filed a major antitrust suit Tuesday against Google.

The big picture: Once a generation, it seems, federal regulators decide to take on a dominant tech company. Two decades ago, Microsoft was the target; two decades before that, IBM.

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2 hours ago - Economy & Business

Why the stimulus delay isn't a crisis (yet)

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

If the impasse between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House on a new stimulus deal is supposed to be a crisis, you wouldn't know it from the stock market, where prices continue to rise.

  • That's been in no small part because U.S. economic data has held up remarkably well in recent months thanks to the $2 trillion CARES Act and Americans' unusual ability to save during the crisis.
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