The hospital ship currently docked in New York, the USNS Comfort, will begin accepting COVID-19 patients after a call from Gov. Andrew Cuomo to do so was answered by President Donald Trump.
But to accommodate COVID-19 patients, the ship's capacity will be cut in half. One crew member has already tested positive.
Trump said the USNS Comfort is "set for COVID" at a White House press briefing on Monday, just hours after Cuomo requested that the ship begin admitting COVID-19 patients. The decision came after reports that the hospital ship's 1,000 beds were sitting mostly empty — pre-boarding health screenings in place to ensure no COVID-19 positive patient boarded were creating a backlog.
This decision comes after weeks of messaging from the Department of Defense that the hospital ship facilities and personnel are not ideally suited to treat infectious diseases. Even so, Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said the Department of Defense was always prepared to treat COVID-19 patients should the need arise.
"As we've said from the start with regard to the Comfort and Mercy, the Department of Defense has never said that we can't do some of these missions ...We need to balance the risk and work our way up the risk ladder," Hoffman said at a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday.
Opening the USNS Comfort involved cutting the ship's patient capacity in half from 1,000 beds to 500. According to Vice Adm. Andrew Lewis, these adjustments have already been made and the ship is set to begin accepting COVID-19 patients.
"We've already transitioned," Lewis said at the Tuesday Pentagon press briefing. "We've done some minor configurations on the ship. There is no risk to any of the patients that are non-COVID at this time. We're able to isolate within the ship."
As for the USNS Comfort crewmember who reportedly tested positive on Monday, Lewis said the individual has been isolated and all those the individual could have come in contact with are taking similar precautions.
"That crew member has been isolated. There's absolutely no mission impact ... The testing was done out of an abundance of caution and nobody had been in close contact with the isolated individual," he said. "Those that have in the recent past are in an isolated status themselves being monitored for symptoms and none are symptomatic at this time."
According to Lewis, accepting COVID-19 positive patients was the only way that the USNS Comfort and the Javits Convention Center could achieve the mission they were sent to New York to do.
"For the Comfort to really relieve the pressure on the New York City hospitals, we have to be able to do this," Lewis said. "There are a tremendous number of patients in hospitals, most of which are COVID positive — a very large percentage were hospitalized for something else, but they're still COVID positive. We're not able to achieve our mission that we were sent here by the president and Secretary of Defense Esper to do in conjunction with Javits."
As of Tuesday, the USNS Comfort had 41 patients on board with five COVID-19 patients. The Javits Convention Center is treating 60 patients who are all COVID-19 positive.
Across the Department of Defense, there are 2,657 confirmed cases of COVID-19 including 1,521 active duty service members and seven deaths.
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