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Coronavirus: US has ventilator stockpile, but thousands do not work

WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - US President Donald Trump has repeatedly assured Americans that the federal government is holding 10,000 ventilators in reserve to ship to the hardest-hit hospitals around the nation as they struggle to keep the most critically ill patients alive.

But what federal officials have neglected to mention is that an additional 2,109 lifesaving devices are unavailable after the contract to maintain the government's stockpile lapsed late last summer, and a contracting dispute meant that a new firm did not begin its work until late January. By then, the coronavirus crisis was already underway.

The revelation came in response to inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services after state officials reported that some of the ventilators they received were not operational, stoking speculation that the administration had not kept up with the task of maintaining the stockpile

In fact, the contract with a company that was maintaining the machines expired at the end of last summer, and a contract protest delayed handing the job to Agiliti, a Minneapolis-based provider of medical equipment services and maintenance. Agiliti was not given the US$38 million (S$54.59 million) task until late January, when the scope of the global coronavirus crisis was first becoming clear.

It is not known whether problems with the ventilators predated the contract lapse, but maintenance of the machines did halt. That delay may become a potentially deadly lapse.

"We were given a stop-work order before we'd even started," said Mr Tom Leonard, the chief executive of Agiliti, which had won the contract to service the ventilators in the stockpile. "Between the time of the original and the time of this contract award, I don't know who was responsible or if anybody was responsible for those devices. But it was not us."

Mr Leonard said confidentiality agreements with the government over the stockpile prohibited him from giving specific figures on the number of ventilators the company was now working on.