A new book details how New York’s largest hospital network has dealt with challenging circumstances amid the COVID-19 pandemic, including buying garden hoses to replace missing parts so they could fix ventilators they received from the state, reports the New York Post. 

This experience and many others resulted in Northwell Health seeking to buy its own medical supply company so it never again has to rely on China or other governments for vital goods like vents, scrubs and masks.

“We should never again have less than a robust stockpile of ventilators and other essential equipment… Overreliance on China to manufacture vital supplies is a perilous gamble,” Northwell Health executive director Michael Dowling writes in “Leading Through a Pandemic.”

“We at Northwell Health are considering acquiring a supply company to achieve a measure of self-sufficiency when it comes to vital supplies.”

The newly-published 187-page book—co-written by Dowling and Northwell’s chief journalist/editor Charles Kenney—is believed to be the first major book written by front-line medical providers who confronted the killer bug’s devastating impact on New York, costing 32,000 lives.

Read the full story in the New York Post