Gasping

The Times quotes all sorts of people on the technological icon for the predicted shortage for the pandemic of most obvious signficance: a lack of respirators:

Right now, there are 105,000 ventilators, and even during a regular flu season, about 100,000 are in use. In a worst-case human pandemic, according to the national preparedness plan issued by President Bush in November, the country would need as many as 742,500...

"This is a life-or-death issue, and it reflects everything else that's wrong about our pandemic planning," said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. "The government puts out a 400-page plan, but we don't have any ventilators and there isn't much chance we're going to get them."

More on this next week - we are going to assemble a bunch of relevant essays on the specific scarcities at stake and the relationship between the present and past measures that might be used in rationing scarce resources.