Navy hospital ship Mercy sails next week to aid West Coast strained by coronavirus
The U.S. Navy hospital ship Mercy will sail next week for either Washington state or California to help relieve strain on local medical systems from the coronavirus pandemic, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Friday.
“I’ve spoken to both the governors of Washington state and California. We hope to deploy, aim to deploy, the Mercy early, early next week and get her underway to one of those two states to help out as well,” Esper said on the Fox & Friends television show.
Washington state reported the first coronavirus case detected within the United States on Jan. 21, and has been hard hit with almost 1,376 reported cases and 74 deaths as of Thursday.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom warned Thursday the coronavirus could infect 25.6 million people - more than half the population of the state - over the next eight weeks. According to the most recent information available from the California Department of Health, 675 people in California had tested positive and 16 had died as of Wednesday.
Earlier this week the White House announced both the San Diego-based Mercy and Norfolk, Va.,-based Comfort -- hospital ships with hundreds of beds the Navy deploys worldwide for humanitarian missions -- would be sent to U.S. cities to help hospitals overwhelmed with an influx of coronavirus patients.
“The president has already committed the hospital ship Comfort to be in New York, we’ve alerted her, she’s going to be getting underway just after the end of this month in early April,” Esper said.
Like the Comfort, the Mercy has 80 intensive care unit beds and can care for as many as 1,000 patients at a time. As Washington’s blood banks report they are facing critical shortages, the Mercy has a blood bank capable of holding up to 5,000 units.
The first crew members boarded the Mercy on Thursday, Navy Surgeon General Rear Adm. Bruce Gillingham told reporters during a Pentagon press briefing. When they are operating at full capacity, the ships the hospital ships have a crew of about 70 civilians and up to 1,200 Navy personnel.
“We are preparing the ship for its 1,000-bed mission, which is the largest mission set that it’s designed for,” Gillingham said on Thursday.
The ship is not configured to handle infectious disease outbreaks because patient beds are stacked close together in large open bays. Instead the ship would be used for trauma care so local hospitals can focus on the coronavirus.
Once the ships arrive in port, they will likely follow the same process the Comfort did in 2017 when it sailed to Puerto Rico to assist after Hurricane Maria, Gillingham said.
“What worked very well in Puerto Rico when Comfort was activated for Hurricane Maria is that the ship functioned as a referral center,” where local physicians decided which patients would be sent to the ship for treatment, he said.
The ships would likely take in “patients who are already hospitalized, or who have come into an emergency room, and then they would be transported to the hospital ship so that that would open up capacity at the civilian hospital for a COVID-19 patient,” Gillingham said.
All of the ships’ crews are getting screened for coronavirus before they are allowed to board, and each patient will also be screened before they are allowed to board, Gillingham said.
“The goal is to have Mercy sailing out of San Diego harbor next week. So they are working very quickly and hard to get the ship ready to go,” he said.
This story was originally published March 20, 2020 at 8:45 AM with the headline "Navy hospital ship Mercy sails next week to aid West Coast strained by coronavirus."
