Where are you getting your information?

Re: Ventilators in New York.

New York doesn't have a ventilator shortage and never did. It had a predicted shortage based on bad simulations, but never a real one. In fact it's now sending ventilators elsewhere:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-ve...

"On April 2, Cuomo predicted the state would run out of ventilators in six days “at the current burn rate.” But on April 6, Cuomo noted, “We’re ok, and we have some in reserve.” Now New York appears to have passed the apex. Deaths, a lagging indicator, crested at 799 on April 9 and hit 606 on April 16, the lowest figure since April 6. Hospitalizations are also declining, and on April 16 also hit their lowest level since April 6. Cuomo today has so many ventilators he is giving them away: On April 15, he said he was sending 100 of them to Michigan and 50 to Maryland. On April 16, he announced he was sending 100 to New Jersey."

I'm morbidly fascinated by what you're reading that has led you to this belief.

Re: ICU beds: I was talking about the world generally rather than New York specifically. For example in New Jersey on April 8th only 3 hospitals were load balancing to others:

https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1247920918640410624?...

In New York city (vs state) the field hospitals that were built have hardly been being used.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/16/coronav...

"the field hospital constructed inside the massive Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Hudson Yards, had 340 patients as of Tuesday afternoon ... The facility has a maximum capacity of 2,500 hospital beds. As of Tuesday afternoon, the Javits Center hospital had treated about 700 patients"

Even on April 1st, the New York Post visited an ICU and found it was only handling double the normal case load, well within capacity (13 patients normally, 26 then):

https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/a-look-inside-an-nyc-hospital-...

Certainly there are cases where single hospitals ran out of space and started load balancing onto nearby hospitals. But, that happens during normal times too.

Where are you reading this? [empty hospitals]

The essay isn't only about New York, it's trying to generalise not only to America but the whole western world. And across the world hospitals are laying off staff due to underload:

https://news.google.com/search?q=hospital%20furlough&hl=en-U...

Who would CPAP machines be for? Why bring them up?

CPAP - the pressure type, not the sleep machines - is now a common therapy for treating COVID-19. For example the British Prime Minister wasn't put on a ventilator but rather given only CPAP (basically, a mask connected to the hospital oxygen supply). This is because there's a growing belief in the medical world that ventilators can cause more harm than good for COVID patients.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/928156

None of which are actually effective in the face of historic unemployment.

That's not a rebuttal. Systems to distribute money exist. The idea they've never been built, as the essay argues, isn't right.

If you want to argue they aren't designed for sustaining a world under house arrest, by all means do so, but no country on earth has created schemes specifically for that.

Making masks which reduce individual aerosol dispersal is easy. N95 masks are harder

Andreessen was talking about medical-grade masks designed to protect doctors from patients, not ad-hoc home made things. And for those masks the point stands: it's hard to make them but he says it's easy.

As for medical literature, go read the links to papers and studies here:

https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/

There are many links to papers, comments and articles by doctors and other specialists who are arguing that the virus is clearly not as deadly as feared. For example, the serology survey that's in the first link under the April 18th update was discussed here on HN just recently.

That's good news, by the way! Don't you hope they're right? My experience is that some people posting on HN don't actually want to study what people bringing good news are saying.