The 1k-Bed Comfort Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 20 Patients | Hacker News Reader

The 1k-Bed Comfort Was Supposed to Aid New York. It Has 20 Patients

nytimes.com

41 pointskull31 comments

This hospital ship was meant to house non-covid patients. It's meant as surge capacity for the NY hospital system. Of course it isn't full yet. Of course it isn't full of covid patients right now, it isn't ever supposed to be full of covid patients. It's not a joke. The joke is that the Ny Times of all places let this ridiculous article go to print when a simple search, or even a summary of the DAILY press conferences where this is covered would have explained the situation.

If NY thinks it's a joke, and it isn't being useful by being there, then NY should be calling for it to be sent somewhere else. I bet the 20 patients who are there now sure are happy to have a hospital that isn't infected with the virus[1] right now.

As a side note: this brand of journalism is disgusting to me. Articles like this absolutely do not help anyone. You can lump this sort of thing right in with the people who ask EVERY SINGLE DAY why we didn't start acting sooner. EVERY DAY they ask this at the press conference. People want to know things like when they can get tested, if their parents are going to die, or if they're going to be able to pay for food this week. But every day they waste this precious time we get with these experts asking stupid self-serving questions like why we didn't start sooner. What possible answer to the question could help any of the very real existential problems Americans and their families are facing right now?

[1]: There needs to be an easier name than "sars cov2" for this. It only creates confusion where people either choose to call it "coronavirus" or "covid".

I'm not sure what article you read. The article I read made it pretty clear that they have failed utterly to the make Comfort any significant relief for its intended purpose.

> The Comfort was sent to New York to relieve pressure on city hospitals by treating people with ailments other than Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. . . .

> But the reality has been different. A tangle of military protocols and bureaucratic hurdles has prevented the Comfort from accepting many patients at all.

> On top of its strict rules preventing people infected with the virus from coming on board, the Navy is also refusing to treat a host of other conditions. Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.

> Ambulances cannot take patients directly to the Comfort; they must first deliver patients to a city hospital for a lengthy evaluation — including a test for the virus — and then pick them up again for transport to the ship.

> At a morning briefing on Thursday, officials said three patients had been moved to the Comfort. After The New York Times published an article with that number, Elizabeth Baker, a spokeswoman for the Navy, said the number had increased to 20 by late in the day. “We’re bringing them on as fast as we can bring them on,” she said.

> Hospital leaders said they were exasperated by the delays.

Your criticisms of the article are baseless.

Exactly. And it's not like they're going to wheel 1000 patients out of the hospitals they are currently in out onto the streets of NYC and fill the ship up in 3 days. It's ridiculous. The logistics of that alone would be untenable. The patient count will obviously grow with time. Super irresponsible from NYT.

This brand of journalism is the new norm. The media has abdicated its responsibility of reporting truth and facts, and instead turned into the opposition party to the President.

> instead turned into the opposition party to the President

If you think the last 3 years of kid-glove reporting has been "opposition party", then an actual critical news media would blow your mind.

Oh it would! It would uncover all of the crimes and coverups of the democratic party. I would LOVE it if journalists acted like, you know, real journalists instead of tabloid political hacks.

It would also result in headlines constantly talking about “Trump Lied About $X”, instead of “falsehood” or “baseless allegation” or whatever weasel word they pick that day to avoid saying what everybody already knows to be true.

Or to put it another way: remember the Obama-era scandal of the Tan Suit? Take that level of spite, and apply it to the most incompetent toddler to ever grace the office of President. That’s what an opposition press would look like. If you have a problem with this, I really don’t think you could handle that.

Comeon dont be overly pedantic. If you call it coronavirus or covid or covid19 everyone knows what you're talking about. There is no confusion.

> If NY thinks it's a joke, and it isn't being useful by being there, then NY should be calling for it to be sent somewhere else.

It's not the state of New York ("NY"), it's New York hospital executives. Why should they send it somewhere else when the situation can be improved? The Navy must have agreed with the assessment, since they have changed their process.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/nyregion/coronavirus-ny-u...

Emphasis mine:

“The secretary of defense is making a risk assessment to determine whether or not we should take on” patients who have tested positive, General Milley told Fox News.

His comments came after New York hospital executives complained Thursday that the Comfort was sitting in New York Harbor largely empty while hospitals in the city were overrun.

By late Thursday, only 20 patients had been transferred to the Comfort, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for thousands infected with the coronavirus.

Earlier Friday, the Navy announced it would streamline the admission process for patients at the Comfort. Going forward, patients will be evaluated at the Comfort’s dock rather than at city hospitals, and they will no longer have to test negative for the coronavirus before being admitted.

> This hospital ship was meant to house non-covid patients. It's meant as surge capacity for the NY hospital system.

The article is arguing that is a silly plan which is not relieving pressure on NY hospitals because the pressure is _only_ COVID patients.

How about “we’re shipping 10 million masks to NY, but only for non-COVID patient treatment”. It would be ridiculous.

Get off your high horse. It doesn't matter what it was originally intended for if hospitals are over capacity, and opening up the ship will save hundreds, maybe thousands.

Journalism is dead

We should not be surprised - this is what Puerto Rico saw after Maria:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/us/puerto-rico-hurricane-...

> The ship was prepared to support 250 hospital beds, but over its 53-day deployment, which included travel to and from the island, it admitted an average of only six patients a day, or 290 in total. An additional 1,625 people were treated aboard the ship as outpatients, all at no cost.

It excludes COVID-19 patients. Patients have to be evaluated at local hospitals (presumably, contracting COVID-19).

“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” Michael Dowling, the head of New York’s Northwell Health hospital system, told the Times.

Northwell has 70,000 employees.

You could see this coming days ago when it was announced these ships would be for "non-virus patients". Obviously there's no way to know for sure that someone doesn't have the virus, in any reasonable time, even if you do test them .

I assumed it was there for overflow of non-covid patients, is that not the case? Are NY hospitals over capacity?

edit: seems this is addressed later in the article but for some reason NYT is paywalling/registerwalling this after the fold for me.

From TFA:

> Ultimately, Mr. Dowling and others said, if the Comfort refuses to take Covid patients, there are few patients to send. And given the pernicious spread of the disease in New York City, where nearly 50,000 were infected as of Thursday, dividing patients into those who have it and those who do not is pointless, he said.

Given the proximity to Javitz you'd think they'd have a Covid wing for handling these cases.

Why do people insist on using ‘TFA’? Bugs me every time I see that on HN.

According to the article

> Mr. Dowling said he has had to tear his hospitals apart, retrofitting any unused space, including lobbies and conference rooms, into hospital wards. His facilities now house 2,800 so-called Covid patients, up from 100 on March 20, he said.

> Across the city, hospitals are overrun. Patients have died in hallways before they could even be hooked up to one of the few available ventilators in New York

I think it's safe to conclude yes

Just put a period between .com and / in the url: .com./

Why does that work?

Did you read the article or just the headline?

It's paywalled for me after the title and photo, from the other replies it looks like these questions were addressed in the full article.

Clicking 'read full article' worked without issue or payment

It shows the title and an image for a split second then a non skippable register prompt pops up over the article.

> non skippable register prompt

Trivial to skip, had you bothered to look into it, or understand how it works. Why even reply if you hadn't read TFA? What value does that have? The very definition of 'off topic'

Shouldn't be cynical, it could be a matter of rampup, other hospitals knowing when to send, when not to, testing problems etc.. In not a long time it could very well be full.

Let's all watch the Magnificent Leader play the blame game on this one.

You know, there's been a common pattern among all of these screwups recently. The people in charge and involved don't seem to know what they're doing.

It's as if all of our systems are being tested, and they're all failing. There are systemic problems in the US that desperately need to be addressed. Perhaps this virus will force us to do so...one way or another.

It's almost as if choosing leaders based on whose soundbites generate the most media coverage isn't a good idea.

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