US military doctors, nurses, and technicians are among the best in the world, able to step in and to do their jobs under a range of challenging and demanding conditions. Fortunately, over 500 professionals from the Army, Navy, and Air Force are currently working alongside civilian medical professionals in New York City’s still overstressed hospitals. The military doctors and nurses are getting glowing reviews from all concerned.
The hospital ship USNS Comfort will soon be leaving New York harbor to return to its base in Virginia. Reviews of the hospital ship’s performance have been mixed at best.
Despite arriving with considerable fanfare, on March 30th, near the peak of the hospital crisis, the hospital ship with notionally 1,000 beds, when configured as a field hospital, treated only 179 patients during its three-week stay. The plan was to provide treatment for non-COVID-19 patients in order to take the burden of local hospitals.
What happened? Why did the ship with close to 1,200 medical personnel treat so few patients? Part of the answer appears to be related to a tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic requirements which prevented the hospital ships from accepting many patients at all. In the days after the arrival of the USNS Comfort in New York City, it accepted only 20 patients. Likewise, its sistership the USNS Mercy, deployed a week before to Los Angelos, had only admitted 15 patients.
In some respects, this is nothing new. When the Comfort was deployed to assist the people of Puerto Rico following Hurrican Maria, the ship admitted an average of only six patients a day, or 290 in total during an almost two-month stay. An additional 1,625 people were treated aboard the ship as outpatients. While in New York, the Comfort averaged just over seven patients per day.
As reported by the New York Times: 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.
As the Navy and New York City hospitals were working their way through an attempt at streamlining the protocols, five patients who tested positive for COVID-19 were accidentally transferred to the Comfort. Shortly thereafter it was decided to allow COVID-19 patients to be treated on the hospital ship, which was quickly reconfigured from 1,000 to 500 beds to allow for treating the virus.
Ten days after the ship arrived, as New York City hospitals were overwhelmed, the number of patients on the Comfort rose to only 62, including 26 in intensive care.
The hospital ships were sources of the virus as well. Shortly after arriving in New York harbor, a crew member on the USNS Comfort tested positive for the virus. On the West Coast, seven crew members aboard the USNS Mercy hospital ship, docked at the Port of Los Angeles, tested positive for coronavirus. The Navy subsequently removed 116 medical staff members from the ship.
What a waste of an amazing asset in these troubled times. As an external observer America, why do these committed and professional people get kicked in the groin?
Please wake up to your modern day politicised, point scoring politics.
And please. Do not inject bleach, I love you too much.
Would bleach ingesters be eligible for the Darwin Awards team prize?
On a similar note (doctors/nurses). A friend of mine posted on FB that his wife no longer wears her nurse scrubs to work in NY. Seems the public isnt so positive about people in scrubs. For that matter they are to the point that she must be infected if she wears her scrubs.
@Willy
logically, wearing scrubs should encourage people to social distance if they fear infection.
In the UK medical staff are more likely to be treated as heros, shouldn’t your doctors and nurses deserve the same respect as military veterans? Your country’s media should be encouraging this attitude and shaming those that are being nasty to medical workers.
Scrubs should not be worn to and from work at a hospital or other clinical treatment area, says this former RN working Emergency and Intensive Care. It sounds like census is down in many hospitals, as only people with flu symptoms are seeking care. Nurses are actually being laid off in many places.
Mayby their brain dead leading ordered them out as the new york mayor wouldnt kiss ass
With all of the conflicting forecasts, It’s better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.. Thank you,
USNS Comfort, and God Speed!
Well, it makes for a damn fine photo op, entering and leaving harbours.