NEW YORK (AP) — A Navy hospital ship with 1,000 beds is scheduled to arrive Monday morning in New York Harbor to help relieve the coronavirus crisis gripping the city’s hospitals.
Unfortunately the USN only has two Hospital Ships, the USNS Comfort and the USNS Mercy. It’d be interesting to see how they cope with future requirements though. It’ll probably be more of FEMA and the Army’s engineers creating temp hospitals.
Chicago’s McCormick Place, which bills itself as ‘‘the largest and most flexible use convention center in North America,’’ is going to be made into a 3,000-bed field hospital.
drump always has to be forced to do the something right (mainly when he see’s it hurting him on TV), so many things that should of and could of been done back at the start of the year.
Comfort is supposed to be on 5-day readiness accorgint to US Navy standars. White House should have known Feb 1 that ship would be needed. It is great to have it in NYC, but it is two weeks or more late. Comfort has been late before.
Sat event was pure PR set-up for the President. I followed the ship using a vessel tracking app. Comfort circled around last night to time it arrival in NY for 10:00 AM press event. But, the fact that this ship could not sail in 5 days is a scandal. But Tea Party just does not want to pay for readiness and anything not needed yesterday, and we all pay for this. Elmhurst would not have been overwhelmed this week iif Comfort had been in port two weeks ago. Sad
A hospital with room for nearly 500 beds has been closed for months in the center of Philadelphia, a city bracing for the spread of the coronavirus and a crush of sick patients.
But the facility will remain empty, city officials said, because they cannot accept the owner’s offer: buy the hospital or lease it for almost $1 million a month, including utilities and other costs.
“We don’t have the need to own it nor the resources to buy it. So we are done and we are moving on,” Mayor Jim Kenney told reporters on Thursday during the city’s daily briefing.
The next day, he said that Temple University would let the city use a music and sports venue for free. The city would no longer pursue the closed facility, Hahnemann University Hospital.
"The USNS Comfort, which was sent to New York City after 9/11, will be used to treat non-coronavirus patients while hospitals treat people with COVID-19.
The trick now is keeping the coronavirus from spreading to and throughout the ship.
As an aside that sort of piggybacks on your post, within the past two decades (2003-2018) NYC has closed hospitals for the purposes of using the space for grossly overpriced residential housing.
I know this for a fact because the hospital I was born in (during the 20thC) was turned into luxury condos. Not one of those apts. had my name on it, however.