photo courtesy of US Navy
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
New York NJ, U.S. President Donald Trump has agreed to dispatch a U.S. Navy hospital ship to New York Harbor to help ease crowded city hospitals. USNS Comfort, based in Norfolk, Virginia, is a ship with 1,000 beds and is currently being prepared to sail to New York.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper told Fox News Tuesday that the U.S. military “remains ready and capable of defending the American people, protecting the nation and safeguarding our interests abroad.”
Field hospitals and a fleet of hospital ships could be called in to help with overflow capacity of infected patients, he said.The USNS Comfort was in port in Norfolk, Va. undergoing repairs after a six-month tour in South America and would not be ready to arrive in New York until “mid April” at the earliest. At this point, efforts are being made to expedite the timeline.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said today at a news conference that the federal government will be dispatching the USNS Comfort hospital ship to New York to assist with the health care capacity.Cuomo said it would be docked in New York City harbor and called this an “extraordinary step” because the Comfort is “literally a floating hospital.”
The President and Cuomo are also discussing the possibility of the federal government putting up mobile hospitals in New York to help with capacity, the governor said.Cuomo said that New York needs to increase its hospital bed capacity by 50,000 to meet the potential need to care for coronavirus cases.
I never seen that one before. That’s pretty cool. At this point I would like to see the whole fleet moving, hey it’s our tax money at work. It’s not like they’re doing us a favor. It’s our money so let’s see the ships move around the United States. Instead of sitting around and shipyards
They should bring that up The Hudson river .
It won’t be here for weeks…the Comfort was under going maintenance after spending months in the eastern Caribbean and it’s not complete. Everybody thinks it’s going to sail into N.Y. tomorrow….it’s not.
Navy says 2 weeks