Lol. Lmao even

I’d even give it the rare roflmfao

It’s always profitable doing business with the city.

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>far for damage than COVID ever could have done.

Over a million Americans have died from Covid.

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Or we can look at the excess deaths when compared to years before the pandemic.

Just in 2020 alone:

>Between March 1, 2020, and January 2, 2021, the US experienced 2,801,439 deaths, 22.9% more than expected, representing 522,368 excess deaths

It's possible that the official covid count is actually an under count as any people that died without being tested for covid are kept out of it even if they did have covid.

Lol dude if you died from a heart condition that was exacerbated because of covid, covid is absolutely responsible. If you died because you didn't get care because the hospitals were overwhelmed and you had to wait for emergency care, covid was responsible. If you had a scheduled procedure cancelled and your condition worsened to the point you died because of it, covid was responsible.

You can fuck all the way off with your bullshit hairsplitting. Excess deaths are still way up and covid is responsible.

Jimmy, are you lying about your dick, too?

Damn I know it’s serious now

well yes that is typically how things go when they sell for scrap rates

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Not to mention renting the Javits center and getting a hospital boat that no one even used.

It’s almost as if the city didn’t know what equipment would be needed to fight a disease no one had any experience with…

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That's kind of my take on this.... I would rather this be the outcome than a fulfilled need for 3,000 bridge ventilators in a city where 8M live. Just because you don't use your insurance, doesn't mean it's a bad investment.

100%

i have no doubt that there are a LOT of rackets going on between vendors and govt. procurement, but you gotta spend—probably inefficiently!—to rapidly respond to a crisis

Also it's not like just an NYC problem. You can find similar stories from many cities and countries. It sucks, but it's not like we're the only place that got things wrong in the end in some way.

Agreed. My only gripe is this is going to be resold to hospital systems at a profit.

I’d much rather see hospitals pooling resources and selling to each other at cost.

This just lets a middleman collect profit by inserting themselves into the equation. And protects manufacturers from seeing a drop in demand.

Never gonna need that shit again...

Rarer than the triple dog dare even

Javits Center was really convenient for getting the vaccine

Then the hospitals themselves need to hire people to facilitate the logistics for it. City has not control over Private hospitals to make them even trade with each other for resources. City hospitals is even more of a joke. Look at the pay difference between city hospitals and private hospitals.

did people somehow expect "used" items to sell for more money?

H5N1 has entered the chat.

I got it a local pharmacy pretty easy.

damn, we have to made global pandemic more efficient ! 🤦‍♂️

Holy crap. What's the hurry?

They spent all this time and money getting this stuff now they're just going to dump it?

This couldn't be warehoused for a few years to be prepared for the next time?

Not even pennies to the dollar. Fractions of a penny.

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Now do opioid overdose

Without having to schlep all the way to the Hudson.

Is this reply an argument for being against government policies that would try to end the opioid crisis?

I fail to see how it is an either/or situation.

And nobody with machine guns pushing you thru the line. I also got mine at a local pharmacy the first day I could. I was having a drink and the bartender told me they got vaccine next door. I said keep my tab open I'll be right back. 5 minutes in and out.

I'm not really sure what the point of that article is.

Yeah, shit was bought at a premium, in a hurry, because we had no idea which way things were going to go. Hospitals were running out of supplies and doctors and nurses sported hefty bags instead of disposable scrubs and were asked to "sterilize" and reuse their own disposable masks.

What should have been the right move? Wait and see? I guess that's the implication here, that this was all wasted money that the city could have saved if it only waited and saw how things were going. Except, of course, then The City could have written a nice article about how city leaders knew and could source supplies but waited, choosing to save money, instead saving who knows how many lives.

Why am i being downvoted for saying i had an easy time getting the vaccine at a pharmacy? :o

That’s because of the drastic measures. If nothing was done and life continued I’d wager 100,000,000 Americans would have died. It got to a point where 3000 Americans were dying daily.

Maybe storing depreciating equipment in the most expensive real estate in the country isn't the brilliant business move you seem to think it is

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It's almost as if needs change and perceived value changes as well...

I dunno I didn't downvote you. Maybe people think you're implying we didn't need Javits. At the time we definitely needed anything that would get more vaccines out there. Personally I waited until I could get it in my neighborhood which was only a few days after my age bracket opened up.

Probably members of the Javits family.

Never let a good crisis go to waste

Virtually all of it has expiration dates and many are probably enough to last way past those dates .

Tri state warehouse space is most expensive in America

No

Feel free to elaborate then.

Someone made a lot of money at the taxpayers expense

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I highly doubt much of it has any expiration date that have passed. Feel free to prove me wrong.

NY is a big state, it's not as if much cheaper space couldn't be had elsewhere in NY.

>The amount of people here that have come to believe that Covid was never a threat is comical

You seem to forget how many people were saying that we didn't need to overreact carelessly. There were an awful lot of places that didn't overspend like this.

To act like "no one knew!" is also revisionist history.

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Maybe making wrong assumptions isn't something you should be snarky about.

If only there were other places, like an hour or two away that had plenty of space that doesn't cost a fortune?

Whatever, it's going to come out that all of this shit was resold for 20x what they paid for it.

Unlikely...more likely an overcount as they counted people who died with covid as covid deaths.

Of course after all it not the government/politicians picking up the bill, it the hard working modern day economic slaves taxpayers that paying for it.

>Unlikely...more likely

You're asserting this based on your gut feelings?

Looking at the excess deaths for just 2020 and the total covid death count it would not shock me if the covid death counts were actually under counted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/13/covid-pandemic-deaths-hospitalizations-overcounting/

The State is paying $2.3M to Kodak to get rid of 700,000 gallons of NY Clean in Upstate.

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2022/09/new-york-pays-kodak-twice-once-to-make-alcohol-for-hand-sanitizer-and-now-to-dispose-of-it-00057541

An opinion piece?

You realize that's no more authoritative than anyone else's opinion right? They put opinion in big letters at the top to make that clear.

But okay let's look the piece:

>But are these Americans dying from covid or with covid?

The piece doesn't say anything definitive and just asks the question.

What are the logistics of getting all of this equipment to a storage facility hours away and then actually getting it back when needed, while being hours away, on top of the storage costs?

It’s a sunk cost and in all likelihood auctioning it off was the most efficient way to get rid of equipment they had no use for and no realistic and cost effective way to store. It’s unfortunate that the money was wasted but if the virus had been deadlier than it was in reality it all would’ve been needed. It made sense with the information we had at the time

I noticed hundreds of unused Covid tests in large garbage bags outside of a school the other day waiting to be picked up.

The people who made these deals should be investigated

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I sold COVID testing supplies during the pandemic, it was ridiculous the amount of money that the city was literally throwing at companies.

Before the pandemic, my average sale for a particular item was $5-$10k with a 20-30% institutional discount for hospitals and med schools. Ubiquitous, commodity type of lab product. One morning in August 2020, I get a call from a company I never heard of looking for a ridiculous amount of these things. Initially, I thought it might be a reseller or just someone throwing huge numbers up to fish for bulk discounting (this was early days, before I realized the flood gates were open). I quoted list price and they asked if I could guarantee supply. I told them if they sent me a PO, I'd personally call the factory to secure delivery. Four hours later, I had a $600k full list price PO - over $300k in margin dollars. I hadn't even had time to research the company before I got paid - turned out they won a city testing contract for something like $20 million a month and they didn't even really have a functioning lab built.

The company I worked for at the time did about $50m a year in sales in the US - over the next three months myself and the rep from Chicago sold our entire manufacturing capacity for a year. I got my last comp check on it January 2022 and then I quit lol.

I personally know a 26 year old lab consumable sales rep that made $700k in commission on one sale in 2020. Didn't do anything wrong, just woke up one day with a $35 million dollar order from NYC and a straightforward, uncapped comp plan.

Medical plastics expire - two year shelf life on most things. It's not that the item isn't good anymore, it's that the packaging degrades and so it can't be certified sterile. It could theoretically be repackaged and sterilized again (they use gamma irradiation for this stuff), but that's probably more expensive than it's worth.

The article actually gave an example of sanitizing wipes that expired on January 31.

Agreed, some of the stuff they're selling is don't have expiry dates, like disposal gowns. But some of the other stuff is literally junk sold to the City for exorbitant prices, like uncertified "N95" masks and the article lead-in "bridge vents" which were ever used and will never be used, as they're not actual medical devices, but rather something built by amatuers thinking this is how it ventilators work.

Are opioid overdoses resulting in so many people dying that the hospital morgues were full and bodies were placed out on the hospital streets in like freezer trucks? Because that’s what COVID was in 2020 when we went into shut down.

Maybe you got in and out easy because hundreds of thousands of people got theirs at Javits & other mass vax sites.

Yeah, they didn't overspend because they weren't an initial epicenter like NYC. By the time it hit them hard, they already had an idea of what worked and what was needed.

We just got a literal pallet of city surplus covid tests delivered unprompted to my job site the other week. A little late in the game, but not complaining.

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What kind of fucked-up hypercapitalist mindset are people in that they feel the need to treat everything as an investment? These were emergency medical supplies. What the fuck did you expect, to turn around and sell them for a profit after the pandemic was over?

Is this a legit news source? I’ve never seen this website before

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hahahaha. yeah, I'm the one making assumptions here.

if you think you can make a profit off this then go ahead and bid on some surplus covid medical equipment. hire some truckers in the middle of a logistical and real estate crisis and sell it for profit in 5 years!

I love you

All of the PPE has expiration dates, including N95s

So what's your point?

It's not possible any of that PPE is expired in such a short timeframe. N-95s easily last for years.

SUNY Stony Brook, SUNY Old Westbury, and Westchester County Center all had field hospitals that closed without seeing a single patient.

Total Cost: $320,976,632

Because we discovered that ventilators kill people.

Doctor here and I sent patients over there.

The Javits center was helpful because we needed beds. However since it wasn’t a hospital with all the associated services we had to restrict who could go to Javits center. Anyone who couldn’t walk couldn’t get transferred there. Neither could anyone who needed specialty consults. No children, no pregnant women. Nobody on a ventilator and anyone who looked like they would go on a vent we held in the hospital in case they crashed. So we offloaded a lot of the “healthier” patients there who just needed oxygen.

The USS Comfort was a hospital ship but they also had limitations. They required a complicated set of steps to do a hospital-to-hospital transfer of a patient, and they asked for no women or children and they had limited specialists; if you needed a cardiologist they shouldn’t get transferred.

In the end NY was able to flatten the curve and after a few weeks the need for both was lessened.

N95s are not sterile. Sterile supplies do expire.

SUNY Stony Brook, SUNY Old Westbury, and Westchester County Center all had field hospitals that closed without seeing a single patient.

Total Cost: $320,976,632

> Agreed. My only gripe is this is going to be resold to hospital systems at a profit.

Nobody wants, or needs, this shit

You spelled COVID wrong.

> Maybe they should throw it in a warehouse or something instead of selling it

Where do you think this crap has been for the last 3 years?

Is that why field hospitals at SUNY Stony Brook, SUNY Old Westbury, and Westchester County Center closed in May of 2020 without seeing a single patient?

For a cost of $320,976,632, plus whatever it cost to tear them down.

If you died in a car accident while going to purchase a COVID test, COVID was responsible.

Hurrrrr durrrr, go make da profit.

Yeah I guess you forget the utter chaos that ensued when the city was caught flat footed and couldn't get supplies at the start of the pandemic.

It's fucking hilarious seeing all the penny punching bean counters come out of the woodwork, as if the cost of storing this stuff is an unaffordable burden compared to the mess we just went through because we didn't have it.

People never learn. Lol.

I see, and they have a shelf life of 3 days? Thanks for clearing that up.

TIL that n95 masks don't last very long.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ventilators-specia/special-report-as-virus-advances-doctors-rethink-rush-to-ventilate-idUSKCN2251PE

You still spelled COVID wrong.

I know all about the ventilators, I read the news 2 years ago when they were rethinking how to treat patients.

Not sure why you’re being snarky when this is an obvious fact to anyone who works in healthcare. Any sterile supplies have an expiration date as that is when the manufacturer can no longer guarantee sterility. Everything from sutures to surgical scissors to sterile gauze has an expiration date attached. They’re usually good for years, but now we are approaching 3 years from the start of Covid and stuff is starting to expire. Non-disposable equipment like clamps and scissors can be autoclaved or otherwise disinfected but all the disposable supplies are expiring and can no longer be safely used due to strict safety regulations.

n95 masks and face shields and smocks are not sterile and as such they don’t have expiration dates. They are meant to be single used and then disposed. But this article is not talking about PPE so I’m not sure why you keep bringing it up.

Three years ago. Literally weeks into the lockdown. April 2020 (some) people knew that ventilators were killing people.

It's a good thing these ventilators were never used, they only would have killed more people.

Why? Because I never said they don't have an expiration date and you completely ignored the point

People worked in the same masks and other PPE for weeks because they couldn't get replacements. "Starting to expire" is nonsense. Everything that has an expiration date is starting to expire, but why would you get rid of it before it is?

You spelled COVID wrong again.

Let me explain it again; the article is about medical supplies expiring. All you are talking about is PPE even though it’s not what the article is talking about. Go back and read it again.

> People worked in the same masks and other PPE for weeks because they couldn’t get replacements.

Yes I was one of them on the front lines. It’s not advisable but it was all we had, there wasn’t good data on how well protection lasted after more than 10 hours of use which is why they were replaced regularly under normal conditions. We made do by adding layers like a surgical mask on top of the n95.

> Everything that has an expiration date is starting to expire, but why would you get rid of it before it is?

Because we don’t like putting stuff about to imminently expire on the shelf next to stuff that won’t; people grab the wrong one too often. That’s partly why CVS won’t keep any prescription meds on their shelves that will expire in less than 2 months, to avoid them getting mixed in and sold with pills that won’t expire for longer.

Instead of scraping these ventilators, they should have started giving them out free to people like you with a positive test result.

I've never had a positive test result so, good luck with that.

Hey no problem, explain it again, you're still missing the point, so I'm done

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Can’t wait to hear when the government buys back the same ventilators for $24M next year

Should’ve called it “vintage” then!

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I’m not sure if your comment is addressing mine… here’s a non-pay walled article if you need your memory to be refreshed: https://time.com/5812569/covid-19-new-york-morgues/

CorpoMedia: And here's why that's a good thing.

I mean sure. Government is incompetent in general. They don’t know anything about medicine period. They should have gone to hospitals and doctors to have them handle the funds.

See, if I had your powers of telling the future, I would have probably looked up the lottery numbers...

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There’s a limited time for them to recoup any costs. They clearly had more than they thought they needed and the market is clearly flooded because of the expiration in 5 years etc

The nation has spent trillions on maintenance of the nuclear arsenal without any tactical use since 1945. Dollars and cents aren't always the most important part of the calculation.

Did you forget to switch accounts or something? How does this work with your first comment?

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Source!? And it cant be right-wing!

Is NPR considered right-wing these days?

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/07/851712311/u-s-field-hospitals-stand-down-most-without-treating-any-covid-19-patients

Well...um...they had beds apparently...but not enough staff. Next pandemic we need REAL house-arrests to flatten the curve

>> they won a city testing contract for something like $20 million a month and they didn't even really have a functioning lab built

>
>Shocker, some new company with zero assets magically wins a huge government contract. Keep an eye out for FBI charging both the company and the politician that was running the bidding process.