Free Republic

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...

Though the USNS Mercy will return to its home port in San Diego, medical personnel from the ship will stay in the L.A. area, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said Thursday. This will include four medical support teams with six staff members who will be deployed to different facilities to help out as needed, including at skilled nursing facilities. Forty medical staffers will stay at a state-operated alternative care site at Fairview Developmental Center in Costa Mesa, authorities said. To help address the staffing shortages at nursing homes statewide, staff from the hospital ship started helping skilled nursing...

Remember the USNS Mercy? The one that the CIC had to get prepped and deployed to Gavin Newsom in an eye blink to prevent all of the hospitals from a massive overload that never happened? How come it’s impossible to get any information about how many patients have been treated on the Mercy or how many are currently in the hospital? Some crew members have tested positive for CV19, *but*, according to NYT, that will *not* affect Mercy’s ability to treat patients. What is up with the secrecy, Gav? Contrast with the USS Comfort stationed in NY, at the behest...

Interest in the goodwill visit has been building since the Pentagon announced in August it was sending its own hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, to neighboring Colombia to provide free medical treatment for thousands of Venezuelan migrants fleeing their homes amid widespread food and medicine shortages. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, in a visit to Colombia last month, called the ship's deployment a humanitarian mission to deal with the fallout of President Nicolas Maduro's mismanagement of the economy. The United Nations estimates that 2.3 million Venezuelans have fled the crisis-torn country in recent years, mainly to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and...

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.''...

BALTIMORE (NNS) -- The U.S. Navy's Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20), based here, was activated Aug. 31 in support of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) efforts to provide medical support in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Comfort, one of the largest trauma facilities in the United States, is being readied quickly for her mission and is expected to get underway for the Gulf Coast by September 3. Comfort is normally kept at Baltimore's Canton Pier in reduced operating status with a cadre crew of 18 civil service mariners who maintain the vessel, as well as a...

ABOARD THE USNS COMFORT (AP) -- Navy nurse Kimberlee Flannery came to the Persian Gulf expecting to help wounded Americans. Instead, she has been caring mostly for injured enemy soldiers. Flannery admits she was "very apprehensive" when her first Iraqi soldier came aboard this U.S. Navy hospital ship. But any misgivings she might have had quickly melted away. "Then you see the pain and the agony of the people, and that whole mindset is erased," said the 23-year-old from Chillicote, Ohio. So far, the patient roster aboard the USNS Comfort off the coast of Bahrain, has been the product of...