Posted on 03/17/2020 3:06:05 PM PDT by 11th_VA
The Pentagon is starting the process of activating Navy hospital ships USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) and USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) as part of the Defense Department’s domestic response to the spreading COVID-19 virus, USNI News has learned.
“We’ve already given orders to the Navy… to lean forward in terms of getting them ready to deploy,” Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told reporters on Tuesday.
The ships will now begin the several days-long process of bringing aboard medical staff and equipment ahead of deploying along the East and West coasts, a defense official confirmed to USNI News on Tuesday afternoon.
Two sources told USNI News that the idea was for the ships to provide relief for coastal hospital systems, with the ships taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus. The Pentagon also has extensive equipment for erecting field hospitals in addition to the hospital ships, but those facilities are optimized for trauma cases, with several beds close together, and not for infectious patients.
“So one of the ways you could use field hospitals, hospital ships or things in between is to take the pressure off of civilian hospitals when it comes to trauma cases, to open up civilian hospital rooms for infectious diseases,” Esper said.
On Monday, Joint Staff surgeon Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs gave more details on how the ships could support civilian hospitals.
“If, for example, a community has a large outbreak and there’s a need for emergency room support or trauma support, a hospital ship is perfectly designed to do that,” Friedrichs told Politico on Monday. “It’s hard to get the hospital ship to St. Louis, but along the coasts, it is an option to use.”
Each ship has a 1,000-bed capacity ...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.usni.org ...
When is the 4077th coming into action?
I didn’t watch today’s presser, and haven’t been online a great deal, so I don’t know. I’m not even sure where to find out a daily tally.
IIRC it was 1776.
Getting ahead of the game - how many of us even thought about these assets as “models” predicted the swamping of local clinics/hospitals?
People have been gaslighted into believing the hospitals are overrun with the dead and dying from CORONA-19. The US Navy hospital ships Mercy and Comfort each have 1,000 beds and only 80 beds for intensive care and have been sent to help with the “overloaded hospital system”, as reported by the government and the media.
However, that’s a complete lie.
Colorado State has 1,849 intensive care beds, 11 times that of both ships combined. Colorado has also has 12,558 hospital beds total, or 6 times the beds of both ships.
New York State has 3,000 intensive care beds, 18 times that of both ships combined. New York State also has 73,931 hospital beds in total, or 36 times both ships combined.
In the US, there are 6,146 hospitals with 924,107 hospital beds with 97,776 intensive care beds. The gaslighting of Americans is that two ships of 2,000 beds total and only 160 intensive care beds is absolutely necessary to a hospital system with 462 times the number of beds and 611 times the number of intensive care beds because somehow the virus is overloading the hospital system.
Colorado has had 100 intensive care patients with the virus. That’s it. 100. That number will change, but it isn’t anywhere near the gaslighted emergency the government and media has tried to convince people is happening.
But the central government must be seen as taking decisive action; that’s what matters.
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