Remember The Hospital Ships?

During March 2020, the hospital ship Comfort was ordered to New York, and the Mercy was ordered to Los Angeles as part of the federal government's initial response to the COVID pandemic. On March 16 of that year, President Trump declared a national emergency, and under the theme "15 days to slow the spread", he endorsed the quasi-national lockdowns ordered by state and local health departments, which famously lasted much longer than 15 days. The moral panic took firm hold, although within a fairly short time, the public was made aware that the model under which the lockdowns were ordered and the hospital ships dispatched was "so highly flawed it never should have been relied upon for policy decisions to begin with."

As the "morning after" phase of the panic slowly dawns, we're gradually learning details of how the authorities tried to cover up the consequences of their initial policy errors. Yesterday's New York Post carries this story:

A US Navy admiral begged the Cuomo administration to send patients to the nearly-empty hospital ship docked on the Hudson River during the height of the pandemic — but his pleas were met with politics and paranoia, The Post has learned.

. . . Another federal facility was set up in the Jacob Javits Center in midtown. Both famously sat mostly empty during their time of operation — with city, state and federal officials blaming each other for the issue at the time.

But in a trove of recently unearthed government emails obtained by activist Peter Arbeeny and provided to The Post, a frustrated Vice Admiral Mike Dumont urged the Cuomo administration to act.

The problem was that in fact, there weren't enough COVID patients to go around, because the Imperial College London model of the pandemic wildly overpredicted the number who would be hospitalized. This was the reason Trump, on the recommendations of his COVID advisers, dispatched the hospital ships in the first place.

“We could use some help from your office,” [Adm Dumont] wrote in an April 7, 2020 missive to Cuomo’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa. “The Governor asked us to permit use of USNS COMFORT to treat patients without regard to their COVID status and we have done so. Right now we only have 37 patients aboard the ship. Further, we are treating only 83 patients at the Javits Events Center.

. . . The Comfort arrived to much fanfare in New York City on March 30, 2020. New infections were spreading out of control, hospitals were overflowing with patients, and supplies were so short, first responders were reduced to wearing garbage bags.

I think it would be more accurate to say media was reporting new infections out of control, hospitals overflowing with patients, and short supplies. For instance, in early May 2020, there was a frenzy of reporting that the City of New York was forced to store bodies in refrigerated trucks, but a year later, the trucks and bodies were still there, not because the morgues were overwhelmed, but because the city had lost touch with relatives to get instructions on their disposition. By mid-May, it was plain that sending both the Comfort and the Mercy to New York and Los Angeles had been unnecessary from the start:

Though Mercy arrived in Los Angeles – and sister ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) arrived in New York City – amid concerns that local hospital systems would be overwhelmed with COVID cases and need additional capacity to support the high patient load, that need to lean on the hospital ship never materialized. LA-area hospitals ultimately only sent 77 patients to the ship over six weeks. The Mercy MTF performed 36 successful general, orthopedic and plastic surgeries, as well as interventional radiology, exploratory laparotomy and skin grafting procedures.

Even if there was finger-pointing in New York over how few patients wound up in the Javits Center and the Comfort, the situation in Los Angeles with the Mercy was exactly the same. Even so, local politicians continued to try to stoke panic with each renewed COVID surge:

A Los Angeles County supervisor is appealing to California’s governor to request a Navy hospital ship return to the city’s port to help hospitals battling COVID-19.

In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA County’s fourth district Supervisor Janice Hahn said hospitals in Los Angeles are reaching a “breaking point” due to the amount of coronavirus cases and asked Newsom to request hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) come to the city’s port.

. . . The Navy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Hahn’s request.

The House Republicans intend to hold some type of investigation into the COVID panic, but I'm not sure if we'll ever get a clear picture of what actually took place. For now, it seems plain that the Navy quickly determined that sending the hospital ships was an epic fiasco, but it kept the matter quiet, and its medical staff doesn't seem to have been anxious to insert itself into any higher-level policy discussion. Admiral Dumont, who seems to have had some part in this belated revelation, waited until he'd been retired for more than a year.