topic: coronavirus | epistemic status: question / idea / hypothesis
the coronavirus doesn’t hit every countries at the same time, so they should share ventilators. “if you get it first, you may borrow my ventilators (until I need them), and when you don’t need yours anymore, you can lend them to me.”
to preserve the incentives to create more ventilators, a country could pledge to share as much ventilators as the other country has itself.
it seems like a strictly positive exchange. the risk might be a country not returning the ventilators, but maybe the Chinese and US armies could act as the world’s police, or something like that (and the US and China wouldn’t exchange ventilators among themselves)
is something like this happening? are countries sharing their ventilators optimally? if not, how could this happen?
EtA: or as a friend proposed to me, are the lent/rented? why not? how much would they be worth if they are/were?
EtA: and medical staff as well
Yes—China is already sending ventilators to Italy.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/latest-austria-limits-movement-nationwide-amid-virus-69603237
“Optimal” sharing is a very complex and hard to agree on goal, but there is movement in this direction. More promising is that governments are gearing up to have companies produce the gear - the UK has asked Rolls-Royce to produce them: https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/03/16/business/ap-financial-markets-the-latest.html