That's a rewrite of the actual history that occurred and what people understood along the way.
They had a realistic four to six weeks max to start production of ventilators. A herculean feat in fact. Even less time if you were going to judge it based on understanding the severity and particular intensive-care heavy effects of the virus.
It was not a certainty to the outside world that it was human to human transmissable until the end of January. There was a lot of confusion due to the total lack of access to China and its data.
From February 1st (China's reported numbers begin to spike here) to the point where you understand it's a high global risk, capable of a large scale outbreak that could threaten the US, it's another 1-2 weeks minimum based on the rate of expansion in China's reported numbers and their inability to contain it properly (and better yet, with China you watch what they do more than what they say; during that first and second week of February, China took what seemed like wild action domestically while playing down the danger of SARS-CoV-2 to the rest of the world, including regarding travel restrictions).
Taking the decision to push billions of dollars in spending to jumpstart very early production of PPE and ventilators, is a big decision that you better be right about when you make it. You were going against the behavior of the entire developed world by producing ventilators in February, so now you need to be prepared to look like a paranoid lunatic, along with being called a racist and xenophobe while you restrict travel and close borders.
It's February 7th and you need to coordinate with domestic industry, local governments, international agencies, and companies around the world.
It's February 14th and you've got your first partnership together, they've agreed to produce ventilators.
It's March 7-14th by the time they are able to produce their first ventilator after preparing a factory for it, preparing any necessary design changes to accomodate rapid scale production, and putting together a supply chain that can scale for the hundreds of specific parts in a ventilator.
You need to build a scheme that can produce more ventilators than the present total global annual supply.
It's mid to late April before they have consequential volume of production. Assuming things go well.
Having closely followed all the ventilator efforts around the world, please show me a faster timeline that is realistic. You're only going to beat our present timeline by a matter of weeks, and that's if you aggressively jump out in front of prevailing 'wisdom' at the time.
It's an extraordinary short amount of time to accomplish the ramping up of producing ventilators.