
California once had mobile hospitals, ventilator stockpile but dismantled them - masonic
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/california-once-had-mobile-hospitals-and-a-ventilator-stockpile-but-it-dismantled-them/ar-BB11O8Gs
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jiqiren
I kind of wish Arnold was more vocal about the stupidity of them dismantling
what he built. Was only $5.8million/year to maintain the $200million+ initial
investment. What a huge waste.

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Apocryphon
Makes you wonder what earthquake emergency infrastructure has been shut down
during cost cutting.

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briandear
Santa Clara County is hell bent on closing Reid Hillview airport — how quickly
they forget that in times of serious disaster, those airports are lifelines.
Watsonville was cutoff during the 1989 earthquake and it was the relief
flights from GA pilots that kept that town alive during that time. Disaster
preparedness is a fundamental role of the state, especially a state like
California where you have the potential for huge catastrophes mixed with
difficult geography and lots of people.

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thedance
I don't get it. What disaster preparedness role does RHV play that the much
larger and extremely nearby SJC cannot play?

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RyJones
It gives you more loading zones and more approach/departure windows.

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thedance
The idea that a bunch of GA misfits flying their mosquitos will be helpful in
case of a major city being cut off by land is something only the AOPA could
come up with. In that event they'll be landing C-5's and 744's full of
potatoes at SJC. One flight of a 744 is worth 400 GA flights.

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lsiebert
Thing about disaster preparedness that needs to be mentioned over and over.
When you do it right, everything looks very easy, like it wasn't a big
problem. A good plan may look like you didn't do very much at all, whereas
efforts when stuff goes bad because of bad plans can look like a lot of
amazing impressive stuff getting done heroically.

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raspasov
Current worst case projections for New York State are for around 30,000
ventilators needed at the peak of the epidemic. 2400 is not insignificant but
hardly enough in this case. Nobody predicted or projected the scale of the
current crisis in terms of ventilators needed. Germany is best prepared of all
countries, has around 30,000. Hopefully we flatten the curve enough so those
worst case projections never materialize.

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twblalock
There is going to be a lot of second-guessing after this is all over.

I find it difficult to blame the governor of a state with a $26 billion budget
deficit in 2011 for cutting this. How many people were thinking about
pandemics then? How many voters would have chosen to keep this program or
discontinue it?

We are about to enter another deep recession and similar cuts will be made,
which may seem unwise to people a decade from now.

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jiqiren
Only needed $5.8million/year in an overall budget of $129billion. It also
resulted in an ultimate loss of an already spent $200million initial
investment.

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triangleman
Not only that but per the article:

"In televised remarks Monday, Newsom said the state will lease beds in
struggling hospitals around the state and is eyeing convention centers, motels
and state university dormitories for use as hospital wards. One such lease, in
Daly City, may cost the state as much as $3.2 million a month for 177 beds."

Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.

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twblalock
> Making small investments for the future is what economics is all about.

This isn't economics. It's politics.

How could you sell something like pandemic preparedness in 2011? How could you
present a long-term picture, knowing what was known in 2011, and argue that
such a thing was a budget priority compared to jobs and social services?

I can't imagine that any politician in 2011 would have been taken seriously
when talking about pandemic preparedness, given the context of the massive
recession that we were still climbing out of.

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ipqk
Maybe by mentioning the swine flu pandemic that had just happened in 2009?
Californians live in earthquake country – they understand preparing for
cataclysmic event in the medium-to-far future.

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fra
Edit: I see the msn link was chosen because of no paywall. I wonder if there
is a way we can give a h/t to the LATimes as well for the fantastic reporting
though.

It would be nice to point at the source, rather than a repost on msn.com:
[https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavirus-
california-mobile-hospitals-ventilators)

~~~
masonic
LAT is clearly credited in this version, but this avoids the native paywall.

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pentae
I'm still of the opinion that pandemic preparedness should be treated like a
threat to the nation and part of the military budget. It should not be up to
the states to prepare, it should be federal and treated as any other military
threat of an unknown enemy. It's crazy to think that we spend so much on tanks
and fighter jets and military but can't find some loose change for viral
pathogens. What about when the enemy deploys a virus against us?

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joncrane
Does anybody else find it ironic that a Republican governor (Arnold)
commissioned the $200m mobile hospitals and that a Democrat (Jerry Brown,
subject of one of the best Punk songs ever) dismantled the project?

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RickJWagner
A good question, but not really.

It depends on the economics and politics of the day. Richard Nixon (R) was a
gun control advocate. Most Democrats were on the wrong side of Civil Rights.

Different day, different context.

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roenxi
I might be projecting; but there is probably a fair amount of overlap between
people who are in favour of enacting good emergency preparedness are the same
sort of people who like balanced budgets (whether by raising revenue or
decreasing costs). Those sort of people seem to struggle in US politics and
the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.

It isn't surprising that the government would be caught flat-footed by
anything that wasn't needing a regular response. Long-term thinkers only get
voted in by accident; the public prefers charisma.

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remarkEon
>the electorate doesn't seem to prioritise that sort of thinking.

>the public prefers charisma.

Democracy is not really tuned to long term thinking. It's tuned to "the next
election cycle", and in places like California elections are happening all the
time.

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faitswulff
I think Democracy in the USA would have a better shot if it weren't for the
two-party system.

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remarkEon
I disagree. A multi-party system exacerbates the problem I'm talking about
(lack of long term thinking). If we get government that swings back and forth
between multiple parties with vastly different visions for the country every
cycle, that seems much worse than swings between two parties that are fairly
aligned at their cores.

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arnarbi
Coalition governments are often very stable across many election cycles.
There’s rarely one single party entirely in charge.

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pauljurczak
"The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced"

WTF? How difficult is it to keep the reserve as FIFO buffer in respirator
supply chain? You probably don't even have to take them out of standard
shipping container.

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Groxx
When your FIFO is suddenly flooded with a massive time-limited over-supply: a
lot gets lost, and re-creating that over-supply really isn't part of your
normal operations.

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kichik
Without paywall:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20200328132638/https://www.latime...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200328132638/https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavirus-
california-mobile-hospitals-ventilators)

