GRANT COUNTY — Grant County will be returning 20 ventilators, needed to help patients with severe respiratory illness to breathe, that it received from the Strategic National Stockpile, Sheriff Tom Jones said in a Monday briefing.

Unified Command, a joint operation of the Grant County Health District and Sheriff’s Office, had received the ventilators last week and dropped them off at Samaritan Hospital for testing, Jones said. From there, the ventilators were to be distributed across the county to where they were projected to be needed.

But Gov. Jay Inslee announced via Tweet on Sunday that the state would be returning 400 ventilators that it had received from the federal stockpile, freeing up the inventory for states with a more urgent need.

“We can do this because Washingtonians are heeding the call to stay home,” Inslee wrote on Twitter. “Their continued commitment to physical distancing is saving lives here in WA and around the county.”

According to Jones, Grant County’s portion of those ventilators would be redirected to New York, where the rate of severe cases has spiked in recent weeks.

During Unified Command’s Monday briefing, county health officer Dr. Alexander Brzezny said he had mixed feelings about this request, but that he had heard from state officials that more ventilators are on their way.

“Within a couple of weeks we should be receiving ventilators that the state procured themselves from other resources,” Brzezny said. “Either by purchasing, on the free market, 1,000 ventilators for the whole state, as well as ventilators they are finding in ambulatory centers and elsewhere where they are not being used.”

“I have been told that, quote, ‘Those ventilators are better anyway,’ end quote, than the Strategic National Stockpile, which has been sitting there for a decade,” Brzezny said.

However, Brzezny expressed some skepticism, noting that local health care providers are likely to have been trained on the older models of ventilators that were being returned. He also cautioned that he couldn’t promise when the replacement ventilators would be available to counties but said that Grant County was not on its own in the meantime.

“The good news is that there is capacity for patients on the west side, to an extent, if we surged suddenly,” Brzezny said.