Men in protective gear arrive to disinfect a construction site on 42nd St., Friday, March 20, 2020, in New York. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is ordering all workers in non-essential businesses to stay home and banning gatherings statewide. “Only essential businesses can have workers commuting to the job or on the job,” Cuomo said of an executive order he will sign Friday. Nonessential gatherings of individuals of any size or for any reason are canceled or postponed. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

The New York Times has been one of the worst news outlets during the Wuhan virus pandemic. They’ve consistently taken partisan positions and purposely misled the public. For example, after Nancy Pelosi tried to blowup the latest relief package, the Times decided to say it was the fault of Republicans — who had previously negotiated the bill in a bipartisan manner –because of course they did.

Today, the paper of record went back to the old steadfast during this crisis, which is to try to create panic in order to score political points.

There are at most 200k ventilators in the US. One million are expected to be needed. Experts say the Trump administration approach – let states fend for themselves in the market rather than a central authority step in – will doom people to die. https://t.co/aC9Pwkf7bA — Trip Gabriel (@tripgabriel) March 26, 2020

Sounds bad, right? Well, except that story is absolute garbage when it comes to actually interpreting the facts. It willfully lies to readers about the timeline in which those ventilators will be needed.

Luckily, a former Times writer chimed in and absolutely eviscerated Gabriel with a fact-check.

2/ The number comes from a March 19 SCCM paper: "[One estimate is that 1/2 of] ICU admissions (960,000) would require ventilatory support. Such projections are gross estimates." More importantly: this is everyone who may need ventilation OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPIDEMIC… — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) March 26, 2020

4/ In other words, whatever happens with COVID, if we built a million new ventilators, 950,000 would be furniture. Added bonus: the paper reports the US already has far more critical care beds per-capita than other nations: 35 per 100,000, compared to 12 in Italy, 7 in the UK… — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) March 26, 2020

6/ Final point: the paper concludes the real bottleneck is in trained staff and "priority should focus not only on increasing [ventilators]… but on growing the number of trained professionals." But I guess bashing the WH for not nationalizing ventilator production is more fun. — Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) March 26, 2020

While the Times is trying to start a panic about a lack of ventilators, the reality is that the load on our resources will be spread out over time due to the mitigation efforts we’ve undertaken. If we ever need one million at one time, we’ve basically entered the apocalypse and nothing matters anyway. Further, one of the biggest factors is not a lack of machines, but a lack of people qualified to use them. That’s a big bottleneck right now. You can’t just pump out ventilators and send the janitor in to hook someone up to one.

The United States is in much better shape when it comes to ICU beds than almost every other country, especially compared to Italy, the country many on the left seem to be rooting for us to become. The problem will be distributing patient loads so individual localities are not overloaded. But we have the beds and ventilators to care for people.

Instead of taking a measured approach to all this information, the Times would rather run a sensational story trying to scare people. The reason why is purely political.

Front-page contributor for RedState. Visit my archives for more of my latest articles and help out by following me on Twitter @bonchieredstate. Read more by Bonchie