NEW YORK, Sept. 21 -- To fight the COVID-19 pandemic, New York State acquired 8,555 ventilators at a cost of 166 million U.S. dollars and 1,179 X-ray machines for 86.4 million dollars, but now they're stacked in warehouse with no plans to distribute them or put them to any immediate use, reported Politico on Tuesday.

"COVID-19 treatments have largely moved away from ventilators, and hospitals say they have plenty available to deal with their immediate needs," said the report.

"The ventilator stockpile, which the state is paying National Guard officers to manage, is the latest example of the equipment left behind after states and national governments went on pandemic-fueled spending sprees as COVID-19 left a deadly wake across the globe," it noted.

In 2020, the U.S. government rushed to order nearly 200,000 ventilators at a cost of 3 billion dollars, yet only half of them even had "the capacity to support the most severely affected patients," the American College of Chest Physicians was cited as saying.

Meanwhile, California scrambled to get 14,000 ventilators that were hardly used, while Canada ordered 40,000 ventilators, more than half of which were never unwrapped, according to the report.

  - Xinhua