As Americans watch governors and city officials plead with the private sector to produce ventilators and personal protective equipment for frontline medical workers, they must be wondering: Why don’t our hospitals have what they need to confront the coronavirus crisis?

Most of the country was woefully unprepared for a pandemic — and pre-crisis federal regulations have slowed responses now to a painful crawl.

Plenty of companies would love to retool factories idled or slowed by the crisis to manufacture goods that are now desperately needed, and so keep their employees working and money coming in. But they need regulators’ OK to produce this stuff — and that normally takes months.

Under heavy White House pressure, agencies are lifting barriers. But it was only late Thursday, for example, that the Food and Drug Administration waived some restrictions on the production and sale of surgical masks — more than two months after the first coronavirus case in the United States was confirmed, in Washington state on Jan. 20.

It’s the latest example of red tape gone awry that could prove deadly. It took weeks for the feds to waive regs even on coronavirus testing kits. For more than a month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only allowed the use of its test — which proved to be inaccurate much of the time — even as companies were champing at the bit to produce better and faster kits.

South Korea kept the spread of the virus under better control than most countries because of its widespread testing, something that took the United States months to match.

N95 respirator masks are produced for medical use and construction-industry use. But manufacturers of those made for the former have to jump through a ton of extra hoops — special tests of flammability and strength, for example — because they’re classified as medical devices.

Why didn’t the feds immediately waive those non-essential requirements when it became clear it was crunch time? Mostly because bureaucrats assume they can only get in trouble for allowing something that later produces problems, rather than for stopping something that was actually fine — a rule that’s all too true in normal times.

Federal manufacturing regs aren’t the only ones that have burdened the nation’s response to the pandemic. Only after Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency in New York on March 7 did he put the pause on a number of now-ridiculous state rules — like one that kept doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and physicians’ assistants who were licensed in another state but not New York from jumping in to help.

Hospitals couldn’t even temporarily increase their bed capacities without state approval. Only registered nurses could collect swab specimens. The list goes on.

Even now, companies looking to help out face major uncertainties: The FDA has only said it “does not intend to object” to the sale of masks that don’t meet its normal regs, for instance — leaving open the risk that you could sincerely play good Samaritan now, and be slammed for it later.

We’ve always known red tape kills jobs. Now the nation is learning it can kill people, too.