What is the benefit of having a naval hospital ship being nearby to the public?
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In a normal situation you might have as many as 1% of citizens admitted to a hospital in a year. If the current epidemic is to spread throughout the entire population we might see about 10% of citizens requiring medical attention. If this goes uncontrolled then they might all require medical attention within the next couple of months. And this is all happening while medical workers get sick as well and end up being too ill to treat patients or might even require hospitalization themselves. And we need medical personnel to conduct all the tests to map out the spread and have some sort of hope of controlling the spread of the virus. Needless to say there is a big demand for hospital beds and medical personnel. So almost every country have mobilized every field hospital their military have access to in order to help out the situation. The United States Navy have activated their hospital ships normally used for was zones and disaster relief. USNS Comfort have been docked in New York and USNS Mercy is heading for Los Angles. They are as well equipped for handling a pandemic as the hospitals, field hospitals and converted hotels are but they will receive patients who would normally have been admitted to a regular hospital so that those hospitals can be dedicated to helping patients of Covid-19.
Simply put: more hospital beds. This ship has 1.000 beds and 17 rooms for surgeries. This is used to treat non-corona patients and thus increase total capacity and reduce the risk of having to turn people away.
They can *significantly* increase the hospital capacity of a port city. Moving them into the port means you can get to them by truck or at least a short boat ride on a normal boat.
The largest hospital in the US is Bellevue Hospital Center in NYC with 2500 beds which makes it exceptionally large for a hospital. Other big ones like Mass General and John Hopkins only have about 1000 beds.
Meanwhile the USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort are two 1000 bed floating hospitals that can pull up and provide as much additional bed space as dropping down another full sized hospital, instantaneously and on demand.
It reduces strain on the hospitals in the city by taking on all the non Coronavirus cases. It’s also safer for those patients as they are less likely to be exposed to the virus while being treated for something unrelated.
Since current events are not allowed on ELI5 you might want to check r/outoftheloop.
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