The USNS Comfort arrived on Monday, but then again, New Yorkers failed to follow the social distancing.
Mayor de Blasio of New York wasn’t happy with it. His comment regarding the onlookers of the hospital ship docking at Pier 90 on the Upper West Side was, “That’s unacceptable.”
During an interview with NBC, “We all feel a lot emotionally about the arrival of the Comfort, it’s giving us so much hope that our military here. As much as we love the Comfort and we love the fact that the military’s here, people must practice social distancing.”
He now is authorizing the NYPD to issue fines for those people who ignore warnings and to disperse gatherings at large.
He continued, “Anyone who’s not social distancing at this point is putting other people in danger, and if we have to give them fines, we will.”
The Comfort will be treating patients who are free from coronavirus so that the city hospitals will be able to treat exclusively people who are positive with COVID-19 and those who need intensive care.
The ship has 1000 beds, 12 operating rooms, lab, pharmacy, CT scanner, and more than 1,000 medical staff.
This is to relieve the pressure from overwhelmed New York hospitals beginning on Tuesday.
The twin hospitals, USNS Comfort and Mercy, are deployed to the west and east coast of the country to give aid to the civil authorities.
The Mercy includes two hospital ships, which was built in the 1970s as oil tankers and then was bought by USNS and was converted to hospital ships and began its services in 1986 and 1987.
It also has 1,000 beds, 15 hospital wards, and 5,000 blood transfusion bags incapacity.
As of Tuesday, the epicenter of the disease has a death toll of 914 and is represented by more than 25% of the US deaths related to the coronavirus, according to the John Hopkin coronavirus database.
Mayor de Blasio also said on Monday, “The number of beds we had at the beginning of March has to triple by May. It’s a daunting task, but we got a big, big boost.”
He also mentioned that they are hoping for 20,000 more beds as that is their expected estimate requiring intensive care, “We require a level of hospital capacity that we’ve never seen, we’ve never even conceived of.”
The Comfort also boasts of an optometry lab, radiology, CAT-scan equipment, and two oxygen-producing plants and a helicopter deck.
Meanwhile, Mercy already accepted its first patients in Los Angeles on March 29. Capt. John Rotruck said, “I couldn’t be more proud of our crew for all the hard work they did to get us here and ready in such a short time. Being able to accept our first patients is a true testament of the teamwork between Mercy, the Navy, the State of California, the county of Los Angeles, and the City and Port of LA.”
In the official release, it stated, “The men and women embarked on board Mercy are energized, eager and ready to provide relief to those in need.”
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