“There wasn’t a great system for sending the things you might need to take care of COVID-19 patients,”

“If you talked to someone in Queens during the height of the pandemic, there weren’t enough ventilators for every patient who needed one. But if you looked at the region, there was probably enough capacity to take care of everyone,”

“A wealthy hospital might say, ‘I don’t know what’s coming, we could have a surge tomorrow, I don’t want to share.’ On aggregate, that creates huge inefficiencies because everyone’s looking out for their own good,” Mello says. “It cries out for a more cooperative approach.

“We truly don’t know what the features of the next disease will be and what the needs will be,” Mello says. “That should create incentives for people to cooperate and hedge their risk.”