New York spent a quarter of a billion dollars on COVID equipment and now it's all just sitting around, unused, gathering dust

Remember at the beginning of the pandemic, when every third word out of every government official's mouth was "ventilators?" Everybody knew we needed 450,000,000 ventilators every year, indefinitely, or everyone was going to die, everywhere.

Yeah about that:
 

“New York never procured anywhere close to what it supposedly needed. But the collection it did manage to build hasn’t done much more than gather dust.” https://t.co/g4TetK7lQp

— Zach Williams (@ZachReports) September 20, 2022

When New York became the U.S. epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo scoured the globe for life-saving equipment as the daily death toll in the state approached 800. 

Models had estimated that New York would need as many as 40,000 ventilators to aid people suffering the worst symptoms of the virus, he said.

The state acquired 8,555 ventilators at a cost of $166 million and 1,179 X-ray machines for $86.4 million, state officials told POLITICO this month. And now they're stacked in warehouses across New York with no plans to distribute them or put them to any immediate use; Covid treatments have largely moved away from ventilators, and hospitals say they have plenty available to deal with their immediate needs.