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A US Navy admiral begged the Cuomo administration to send patients to the nearly-empty hospital ship docked on the Hudson River during the height of the pandemic — but his pleas were met with politics and paranoia, The Post has learned. With city medical facilities packed with critically ill COVID patients in the spring of 2020 — and just days after the infamous edict by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to send COVID patients to nursing homes, which critics say resulted in thousands of deaths — the Trump administration sent the USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed ship, to relieve hospitals of patients with...

Norfolk-based USNS Comfort was deployed to help treat patients in the early days of the pandemic. Mississippi health officials hope it can be deployed again. NORFOLK, Va. — Hampton Roads could send help to one of the COVID-19 pandemic's hardest-hit states. Mississippi has requested the federal government send a military hospital ship such as the Norfolk-based USNS Comfort to help its overloaded hospitals with COVID-19 patients, state health official Jim Craig said Wednesday.... The University of Mississippi Medical Center has 127 COVID-19 patients, including 26 children, Dean LouAnn Woodward said Wednesday. About 90% of them are unvaccinated, she said. The...

Fashion designer Kenneth Cole defended his brother-in-law Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his "exemplary public service" following a New York attorney general investigation that found Cuomo had sexually harassed multiple women. "Do we all not remember the extraordinary clarity @govnycuomo brought everyone at a time of such confusion & despair and light at a time of such darkness," Cole, who is married to the Democratic governor’s younger sister Maria Cuomo Cole, wrote on Twitter Thursday. "Do people really feel that after 40 yrs of exemplary public service, ones legacy should be extinguished without due process?" the fashion mogul of Kenneth Cole...

Governor Cuomo’s top aide privately apologized to Democratic lawmakers for withholding the state’s nursing-home death toll from COVID-19 — telling them “we froze” out of fear the true numbers would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, The Post has learned. The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because “right around the same time, [then-President Donald Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” according to...

A NURSING home in New York begged officials to move their coronavirus patients to the Jacob Javits Convention Center or the USNS Comfort — but was denied. Donny Tuchman, the CEO of Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn, sent an email to the city health officials on April 9 pleading for help for his residents, 55 of whom the city says have died from the virus. “We don’t have the ability to cohort right now based on staffing and we really want to protect our other patients,” Tuchman wrote in an email, according to the New York Post. In another...

New York health officials were warned in writing that a Brooklyn nursing home where 55 patients have died of coronavirus was overwhelmed — weeks before it began topping the state’s official list of resident COVID-19 deaths, damning emails show. Cobble Hill Health Center CEO Donny Tuchman sent a desperate email to state Health Department officials on April 9, asking if there was “a way for us to send our suspected covid patients” to the hospital built inside the Javits Convention Center or the US Naval hospital ship Comfort — the under-utilized federal medical facilities on Manhattan’s West Side. “We don’t...

The USNS Comfort and the Javits Convention Center are still sitting mostly empty despite being set up in New York City to treat coronavirus patients while emergency rooms across the city overflow with patients. The 1,000-bed Comfort and 2,500-bed Javits Center were set up by the federal government and military to alleviate the strain on New York's hospitals at the height of the pandemic. But immediately, hospital executives expressed frustration and outrage at the red tape that was stopping them from actually contributing to the crisis. The first problem was that neither was willing to take COVID-19 patients. The Comfort...

A crew member on the Navy hospital ship sent to NYC to help with the coronavirus pandemic has tested positive for the illness, a report said on Monday night

Nearly 40 patients have been transferred to USNS Comfort hospital ship since it began taking patients on board, a spokeswoman told CBS2 Sunday. Asymptomatic patients who haven’t yet been tested for the coronavirus can now go to Comfort, where they will have their temperature taken and answer a questionnaire. They’re then put in isolation and tested for COVID-19. If negative, they’re moved elsewhere on the ship for treatment. If positive, they’re sent back to the Javits Center, which is now a COVID-only facility. A Navy spokeswoman told CBS2 that on Friday, five people tested positive at Comfort and were sent...

Norfolk, Virginia 1:52 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Mark. And you’re doing a fantastic job, and our country appreciates it very much. And thank you, everybody, for being here. Today, I’m deeply honored to be at Naval Station Norfolk — the largest naval base anywhere in the world, and the home to the most powerful fleet that has ever sailed the seas. I just passed some of the most beautiful and, frankly, the most highly lethal ships that I have ever seen in my life, and there are a lot of them. And they’re in better shape...

President Donald J. Trump announced today that he will travel to Norfolk, Virginia, on Saturday, March 28 to bid bon voyage to the hospital ship USNS COMFORT (T-AH-20) as it leaves for New York City to the frontlines of the COVID-19 virus response. The USNS COMFORT will sail well ahead of its originally scheduled departure time to answer America’s call to battle against the global pandemic here at home. At the President’s direction, the Administration announced last week that the USNS COMFORT would be activated and sail to the metropolitan New York area to ease the burden of area hospitals...

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Doctors on the U.S. Navy's hospital ship Comfort are fighting gangrenous infections in broken limbs as they try to save the lives, if not the arms and legs, of Haiti's earthquake victims. "Originally we were seeing primarily a lot of orthopedic injuries now we're starting to see those injuries and wounds are infected," Commander Mark Marino, head of nursing on the USNS Comfort, said on a tour of the ship as it was anchored off the coast of Port-au-Prince. Asked how many of the 500 people treated so far on the ship have needed amputations, Marino replied...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua, July 15, 2009 – I left the USNS Comfort July 13 after a little more than three days aboard the hospital ship. It was not long enough. I underestimated the time I would need to gather the stories I wanted to tell. It is truly an amazing ship, with a crew of physicians, dentists, optometrists, nurses and a host of other staff who perform incredible work in difficult conditions. Hundreds of health care professionals from around the world, many of them volunteers, gathered to deliver basic care that most of us in the United States take for granted....

Chief Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell confirmed to Politico that Department of Defense officials cautioned Barack Obama's campaign that his planned visit to wounded American troops in Germany could not be political in nature and that he would be barred from bringing along campaign staff and reporters. He also said that Cindy McCain recently requested to visit sailors aboard the U.S.N.S. Comfort and was denied. "Sen. Obama is welcome to visit Landstuhl or any military hospital in his official capacity as a United States senator," Morrell said in a brief interview. "But there is a DoD policy which governs campaigning and...

Charlottesville-based filmmaker Scott Mactavish’s new documentary depicts courage and character among American military personnel in a response to what he calls Hollywood portrayals of American troops as rapacious, homicidal sociopaths. “God and Country,” which is now ready for distribution, “corrects the general consensus of the military as guys who have no other recourse in life,” according to Mactavish. He said films such as “Redacted,” “The Valley of Elah” and “Stop Loss” portray American troops as “blood-thirsty thugs.” “It’s part of Hollywood’s [thought pattern] to put out that message and maybe that’s because they haven’t had much contact with the military...

NORFOLK (NNS) -- The hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) stopped at Naval Station Norfolk Oct. 15, to allow approximately 500 crew members to return to their home units and parent commands before Comfort travels to its lay berth in Baltimore. Comfort completed its four-month humanitarian assistance and training deployment to 12 Latin American and Caribbean nations Oct. 7. Comfort served as an enabling platform for U.S. medical professionals, including U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, Public Health Service, Air Force, Army and non-government organizations Project Hope and Operation Smile, to provide more than 386,000 medical “encounters,” to more than 98,000 patients...

The U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort will be sailing off Florida waters on Sunday en route to Latin America and the Caribbean -- and The Miami Herald will be on board for a first report on the mission. President Bush has ordered the ship, with a mixed 500-plus military and civilian crew and staff, to spend three months on a 12-nation tour as a goodwill gesture. The Baltimore-based ship left port in Norfolk, Va., on Friday morning in what the Pentagon's U.S. Southern Command is calling ``its first-ever, large-scale humanitarian assistance deployment to Central America, South America and the Caribbean.''...

BETHESDA, Md. (AP) -- Among the casualties treated aboard the hospital ship USNS Comfort in the early weeks of the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a civilian shot multiple times while caught in crossfire. The patient was seriously wounded, but stabilized after emergency surgery. But 24 hours later, the Iraqi was dead after bleeding uncontrollably from his wounds, his blood poisoned by an unknown infection that didn't respond to antibiotics. Within a week, about a quarter of the injured troops on the ship in the Persian Gulf had the same bacteria. Soon, another Iraqi in the intensive care unit died....

WASHINGTON (NNS) -- The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) departed New Orleans Oct. 8 to return to her homport in Baltimore after providing several weeks of disaster relief to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Comfort has been acting as an emergency trauma center for the city since Sept. 28. During the ship's 10 days in New Orleans, Comfort's medical staff has worked alongside local civilian physicians to treat trauma patients aboard ship in a partnership between the Navy and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. Comfort...

PASCAGOULA, Miss. (NNS) -- The hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) departed Pascagoula, Miss., Sept. 20 after spending ten days providing medical and dental care, and disaster relief assistance to the citizens of Pascagoula and surrounding areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. As Hurricane Rita approaches the Gulf of Mexico region, many Navy assets in the Gulf region are preparing to get underway to ride out the storm. “Our ship must leave to be in a position to be out of the storm’s path in time,” said Ship's Master Capt. Tom Finger. Despite the early exit from Pascagoula, Comfort leadership is...