Bay has the smartest and most resourceful people in the world. Why can’t we utilize this talent to figure out how to build respirators. Sure there is a bunch of high end 3d printers in the area.
Snark aside, modern respirators are complex machines. Certain components could maybe be 3D printed. I suspect we'd probably just be moving the bottleneck up the supply chain, however.
We'd hit the ventilator bottleneck even if not for them, but the operator bottleneck will come much sooner.
If I had the choice between no ventilator and one operated by a non-doctor just reading a manual I'd still take the second one.
I'm not Italian, but I could understand that some people might find offensive to imply that Northern Italy (with one of the bests healthcare system) are less smart and resourceful than Bay people.