Medical ships have arrived & docked in both New York Harbor and Los Angeles.
The one in NY arrived on Monday. It's now Friday.
They each have about 1,000 hospital beds, which COULD help a lot.
However, AFTER they arrived, the federal government increased restrictions on who
could be admitted onto these ships for treatment, which added to the Navy's own restrictions. One of which, is that the patients have to test negative for Covid-19. WTF !!
This resulted in them only treating a 'grand' total of 20 patients in NY and only 15 in LA.
Obviously, this is of little of help with thousands of current patients, most of them suffering with Covid-19. Some are calling it "a joke". If so, it is a very bad joke.
From the New York Times;
In response to:
The 1,000-Bed Comfort Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 20 Patients.
“It’s a joke,” said a top hospital executive, whose facilities are packed with coronavirus patients.
Michael Schwirtz
By Michael Schwirtz
Published April 2, 2020
Updated April 3, 2020, 11:46 a.m. ET
Such were the expectations for the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort that when it chugged into New York Harbor this week, throngs of people, momentarily forgetting the strictures of social distancing, crammed together along Manhattan’s west side to catch a glimpse.
On Thursday, though, the huge white vessel, which officials had promised would bring succor to a city on the brink, sat mostly empty, infuriating executives at local hospitals. The ship’s 1,000 beds are largely unused, its 1,200-member crew mostly idle.
Only 20 patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.
“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” said Michael Dowling, the head of Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital system. “Everyone can say, ‘Thank you for putting up these wonderful places and opening up these cavernous halls.’ But we’re in a crisis here, we’re in a battlefield.”
The Comfort was sent to New York to relieve pressure on city hospitals by treating people with ailments other than Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
President Trump left a nine-day sequester in the White House last week to travel to Norfolk, Va., to personally see off the ship as it set sail for New York, saying it would play a “critical role.” The ship’s arrival on Monday was cheered as one of the few bright moments in a grim time for the city.
But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.
On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.
Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.
At a morning briefing on Thursday, officials said three patients had been moved to the Comfort. After The New York Times published an article with that number, Elizabeth Baker, a spokeswoman for the Navy, said the number had increased to 20 by late in the day. “We’re bringing them on as fast as we can bring them on,” she said.
The next day, on Friday, Ms. Baker said the Comfort would begin screening patients for the coronavirus on site by taking their temperature and giving them a short questionnaire, to relieve the burden on hospitals.
Hospital leaders said they had been exasperated by the delays.
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