The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

The new coronavirus attacks the lungs and, in severe cases, leaves a patient unable to breath without mechanical assistance — a ventilator. In Italy, ravaged by COVID-19 and facing its worst health crisis since World War II, doctors have been forced to play God.

Marta Manfredi's ailing, 83-year-old grandfather was denied care under an emergency edict where only patients with the best chance of survival earn a ventilator. "They said there was no point," she told Reuters. He died in a morphine-induced sleep.

This must not be America's future. But the math is cruel when it comes to the nation's supply of hospital rooms, intensive care units, ventilators, respirators and other tools necessary to fight the pandemic.

2.9 million Americans could need ICU

A new Harvard study made public this week shows that even under a moderate outbreak, 40% of hospital sectors across the country would run out of rooms.

The nation has about 46,500 ICU beds, maybe double that in a crisis. If coronavirus proves as impactful as the 1918 flu, 2.9 million Americans will require intensive care, according to a Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security report. An estimated 742,500 will need ventilators, based on a Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet. Right now, hospitals have the capacity to ventilate 160,000 patients.

Vice President Mike Pence assured Americans Thursday that the administration has "literally identified tens of thousands of ventilators" that can be prepared for use in treating virus victims. But medical researchers have said that there is simply not enough of everything the nation might need, especially when in a world where hospitals will still need to take in car crash victims, cancer patients and expectant mothers requiring hospitalization in the months ahead.

Testing for the virus remains woefully short eight weeks after the first U.S. case was diagnosed. Physicians have uncovered more than 13,000 infections and more than a hundred deaths from the virus. Federal officials are predicting an even more dramatic rise, if what happened in China, Italy, Spain and other countries is any indication. And a new HHS analysis said the pandemic could last 18 months and include multiple waves of infection.

States desperate for federal aid

State officials are trying to flatten that upswing by closing schools and universities, restricting business operations, canceling mass gatherings and even ordering some populations to shelter in place. But states remain desperate for federal help to increase hospital space and acquire the necessary ventilators, respirators, gowns, gloves, goggles and face shields. What has to be done?

►Prepare sooner than later. After squandering two months downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic and delaying testing, there are finally signs President Donald Trump is picking up the pace. Word arrived Wednesday that the 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship Comfort will at some point begin steaming to New York harbor. Coronavirus cases are multiplying faster in and around the city than anywhere else. A second Navy hospital ship is also being prepared for deployment. Whether the ships are set for communicable diseases, they can certainly be used to handle noncoronavirus patients to free up space in local hospitals.

►Tap Pentagon stockpiles. The Defense Department will make available up to 5 million of the tight-fitting N95 respirator masks health care workers desperately need to stave off infection as they treat patients. The Pentagon also has 2,000 ventilators to lend, and 12,700 are in the National Strategic Stockpile.

The Pentagon has a history of far-reaching medical support. Military doctors and engineers set up an infectious disease treatment center in Liberia during the Ebola crisis and committed to build 17 other treatment facilities in 2014. The Army Corps of Engineers has strong capacity for building hospitals. And the Department of Veterans Affairs, with its 172-hospital system, can be called upon to assist a civilian crisis.

►Achieve a war footing. A crucial element of America's success in World War II was the federal ability to prioritize the manufacture of tanks, planes and other materiel by U.S. industry. The Defense Production Act of 1950 was passed to codify that emergency process, and Trump said Wednesday that he was invoking it "just in case we need it."

Manufacturers need time to retool and prepare to manufacture a new product. Why not set that process in motion immediately?

Britain has already asked Ford, Honda and Rolls Royce to begin reorganizing and building the ventilators and protective gear that health care workers will need to keep people alive.

Known infections in the United States have increased tenfold in a week, and the numbers will keep rising. Even if worst-case scenarios are averted, the nation has to get ready for what's coming.

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