The U.S. Navy has two Mercy-class hospital ships that have been used to provide humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, including to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria in October 2017. USNS Comfort is based in Norfolk, Virginia, and USNS Mercy is based in San Diego. Each ship could be fully activated and crewed within five days.
The ships each contain two fully-equipped operating rooms, 1,000 hospital beds, digital radiological services, a medical laboratory, a pharmacy, an optometry lab, a CAT-scan and other capabilities, according to the Navy.
I have yet to hear anything out of the Trump maladministration about deploying these ships to port cities on the East or West Coasts hard-hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Even if they had limited capacity to treat COVID-19 patients, the two ships would definitely be able to free up hundreds of hospital beds on land.
Now is the time to get them deployed. Here’s a DOD video about the world’s biggest hospital ship, the USNS Comfort.