WASHINGTON — When Ford’s chief executive, Jim Hackett, announced on Tuesday that the carmaker would team up with General Electric to build ventilators, he tempered the good news with a note of caution: “We’re talking about early June.”
That was just one of several examples that underscored the price of the Trump administration’s slow response to evidence as early as January that the coronavirus was headed to the United States.
For the first time, it is now possible to quantify the cost of the lost weeks, as President Trump was claiming as recently as February that in a “couple of days” the number of cases in the United States “is going to be down to close to zero.”
Ford’s timeline suggested that if the administration had reacted to the acute shortage of ventilators in February, the joint effort between Ford and General Electric might have produced lifesaving equipment sometime in mid- to late April.
fumbled its first effort to send out a test. Commercial laboratories could have produced their own tests earlier, according to industry officials, and governors have said that the wartime law would result in desperately needed equipment arriving in weeks, instead of months.
The gap between the production timelines and the need for immediate supplies led to a scathing assessment from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York. New York accounts for more than 25,000 cases, more than half the total in the country, he said, but it has received only 400 ventilators from the federal government.