Those two governors had to step up to the plate because Trump WASN'T doing his job.
Those ships only had 400 beds and they actually couldn't take Covid Patients. The idea was to free up beds in hospitals by moving non-Covid patients there. Except no Hospital was willing to transfer a patient to a hospital ship where an E-3 with only a few weeks of training would handle their care. That just screamed "MALPRACTICE SUIT".
“It’s a joke,” said a top hospital executive, whose facilities are packed with coronavirus patients.
www.nytimes.com
On Thursday, though, the huge white vessel, which officials had promised would bring succor to a city on the brink, sat mostly empty, infuriating executives at local hospitals. The ship’s 1,000 beds are largely unused, its 1,200-member crew mostly idle.
Only 20 patients had been transferred to the ship, officials said, even as New York hospitals struggled to find space for the thousands infected with the coronavirus. Another Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Mercy, docked in Los Angeles, has had a total of 15 patients, officials said.
“If I’m blunt about it, it’s a joke,” said Michael Dowling, the head of Northwell Health, New York’s largest hospital system. “Everyone can say, ‘Thank you for putting up these wonderful places and opening up these cavernous halls.’ But we’re in a crisis here, we’re in a battlefield.”
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.
“It’s pretty ridiculous,” he said. “If you’re not going to help us with the people we need help with, what’s the purpose?”
In short, it was a typical Trump Operation- high on spectacle, short on substance. That shit might work on a fake game show, but it doesn't work in the real world.