California once had mobile hospitals and a ventilator stockpile. But it dismantled them napavalleyregister.com/news/local/cal… via @NapaRegister
They were ready to roll whenever disaster struck California: three 200-bed mobile hospitals that could be deployed to the scene of a crisis on flatbed trucks and provide advanced medical care to the injured and sick within 72 hours.
Each hospital would be the size of a football field, with a surgery ward, intensive care unit and X-ray equipment.
Medical response teams would also have access to a massive stockpile of emergency supplies: 50 MILLION N95 respirators, 2,400 portable ventilators and kits to set up 21,000 additional patient beds wherever they were needed.
In 2006, citing the threat of avian flu, then-Gov. Schwarzenegger announced the state would invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a powerful set of medical weapons to deploy in the case of large-scale emergencies & natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires and pandemics.
“In light of the pandemic flu risk, it is absolutely a critical investment,” he told a news conference. “I’m not willing to gamble with the people’s safety.”
The state, flush with tax revenue, soon sank more than $200M into the mobile hospital program and the Health Surge Capacity Initiative to stockpile medicines and medical gear for use in outbreaks of infectious disease.
But the ambitious effort, which would have been vital as the state confronts the new coronavirus today, hit a wall: a brutal recession, a free fall in state revenues
And so, that year, the state cut off the money to store and maintain the stockpile of supplies and the mobile hospitals. The hospitals were defunded before they’d ever been used.
Much of the medical equipment — including the ventilators — was given to local hospitals and health agencies. But the equipment was donated without any funding to maintain them. The respirators were allowed to expire without being replaced.
Together, these 2 programs would have positioned CA to more rapidly respond as its COVID-19 cases exploded. The annual savings for eliminating both programs? No more than $5.8M per year, according to state budget records, a tiny fraction of the 2011 budget, which totaled $129B.
