WASHINGTON– A new internal watchdog report finds that medical facilities were unprepared for the coronavirus and are still scrambling to discover devices and deal with a shortage of tests– problems critics state could have been averted had President Donald Trump taken the pandemic seriously from the start.
From an absence of enough protective equipment to worries of not having enough ventilators to fret about keeping personnel healthy to financial issues, medical facilities are having a hard time to stay up to date with a “fast-moving” pandemic, according to a report Monday from the Department of Health and Person Solutions’ own inspector general.
” Medical facilities reported that their most substantial difficulties fixated screening and taking care of patients with known or presumed COVID-19 and keeping personnel safe,” the report stated.
Trump minimized the intensity and level of the coronavirus for two months, falsely claiming that his travel restrictions against China had kept the disease from coming to the United States. He did not state a nationwide emergency till mid-March, which lastly sent out a signal to city governments and hospitals that federal funds would help them handle the crisis.
” I think by the first or second week of February it was clear they required to be prepping,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who dealt with the Ebola break out reaction under former President Barack Obama. “But the signal from the United States government never ever came.”
The report from HHS was self-generated, not asked for by Congress. It mentions that a few of the issues it discovered are already being resolved by ne