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Donald Trump Boasted Medical Shortages Were Fixed While Officials Fretted About Supplies on Conference Calls

As the president touted his success in making sure all the medical equipment needed was available, officials on leaked conference calls were seeing a very different picture.

When Donald Trump boasted at a May 1 press conference that America’s ventilator, test kit, and mask shortages were a thing of the past as the nation then topped 60,000 deaths, top federal health and emergency-management officials were privately warning that states were still experiencing shortages of masks, gowns and other medical gear. Politico reports Wednesday that according to a recording of an interagency conference call between FEMA and HHS officials across the country—one of three the news outlet said it obtained—the authorities also expressed concern that governors moving to reopen their economies while cases were still prevalent threatened to plunge the nation into a new and potentially deadlier chapter of the outbreak that could overwhelm hospitals. “The numbers of deaths definitely will be high,” Daniel Jernigan, director of the Center for Disease Control’s influenza division, said at the start of a May 1 conference call; meanwhile another official said that if all the states moved to lift their social-distancing restrictions, hospitals nationwide could see a surge of new coronavirus cases, creating the potential for severe ventilator shortages within weeks. On a April 24 call, concerns were expressed about testing volumes, with one official saying; “Funding and staff is not an inhibitor. It’s the ability to secure testing supplies and PPE.” A spokesman for White House responded to Politico about the report, saying: “The president has been clear that when the need for PPE arises, the administration has developed an historic public-private partnership designed to secure and deliver these critical supplies to everyone who needs them in record time.”