US Navy hospital ships brace for coronavirus response

Two US Navy hospital ships will be part of the Defense Department’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman said.

The USNS Comfort and USNS Mercy are being prepared for deployment “as needed to assist potentially overwhelmed counties with acute patient care,” Jonathan Rath Hoffman, assistant to the defense secretary for public affairs, said during a news conference at the Pentagon on March 18.

The Comfort is now in Norfolk, Virginia, for maintenance, and the US Navy has been asked to expedite that, Hoffman said, adding that it may take “a little while” for that ship to be ready to go. It will go to New York when its maintenance is complete.

The Mercy is on the West Coast and is ready to go in “days, not weeks,” he said, and where it will go will be determined when it’s ready to sail.

Both ships face issues with manning, however. Air Force Brig. Gen. Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, said the ships would likely be manned with typical staffs of personnel trained for combat casualty care, rather than for dealing with a contagious disease like the coronavirus.

“Our understanding is that the intent is the ships will be used to take non-coronavirus patients, which is what our staffs are best assigned and organized to do,” he said.

Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper suggested yesterday that one role for military medical professionals in regard to coronavirus response would be to take non-coronavirus patient care off of the hands of civilian hospital staffs so that those staffs could instead deal with coronavirus patients. Military medical personnel, and military medical facilities are geared more toward trauma care than dealing with contagious patients, he explained.

The Defense Department has also put a number of active duty medical units on alert. That includes different types of units.

Altogether, enough units have been put on alert to provide 1,000 beds, a number that doesn’t include those on the navy’s hospital ships.

DOD has a variety of deployable medical units it could draw on to provide those 1,000 beds, Friedrichs added, including Air Force Expeditionary Medical System units that can be transported rapidly on aircraft; the Army’s much larger Combat Support Hospitals, which can also be deployed by air or over the ground; Army field hospitals; and Navy Expeditionary Medical Facilities.