NY is creating EIGHT temporary hospitals total. I can't imagine the logistics, staffing, materials, etc. A few days ago I wasn't terribly concerned, but it continues to look worse and worse for the US.
Static armies are what Saddam, Assad, and the Iranians have. Though their weapons are pretty up to date, they still get squished when fighting Modern armies like the US or France. That is because their 'doctrine' is Static, mostly to be coup-proof. In Static Armies, you don't give field commanders a lot of lee-way or control. You send orders, they execute. They don't get to play jazz. This is due to regime issues that don't translate into up to date warfare.
In Modern armies, you have terribly expensive weapons too. But the training is what makes it really work. You have to train field commanders to play jazz and improvise. It's a constant blitzkrieg of movement and mechanized/digitized warfare. There is no sitting around. That takes training people to think for themselves; a big no-no in regimes.
The US is the example of a modern force, complete with fancy gadgets and fancy training.
We should expect that NYNG could get eight field hospitals going in hours. That is the entire basis of our military, to move really fast and get things done. Imperfectly? Oh hell yes. But fast is the entire name of the game.
https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
The experience is more akin to being in a massive company with tons of middle managers who are always looking to self-promote and cover their a.
The army has many great men and women in it, despite the bs, but let's not pretend it's some "dynamic" entity.
Don't believe me? Read Bob Gates' memoir, where he recounts how as SecDef he had to fight the Pentagon brass just to get MRAPs that would save lives. And he was in charge of the department!
>In Static Armies, you don't give field commanders a lot of lee-way or control. You send orders, they execute.
If we had a Static Army, the Pentagon brass would have immediately yielded to SecDef and executed his orders. The fact that there had to be immense debate around the issue means that everyone is granted the right to do their thing and improvise in the meantime. You can bet troops were trying all sorts of wacky things to IED-proof their Humvees.
But you can bet no high ranking officer in Saddam Hussein's army was successfully "fighting the bureaucracy" to get things through.
One tid-bit I did find interesting was :
"Likewise, armies with weak organization, training and discipline will find chemical preparedness – which involves a lot of training on how to get those gas masks and NBC suits on fast – very difficult; actually getting all of the fidgety equipment to the right spots will also prove hard (but is second-nature to a modern system military which has nothing but fidgety equipment)."
I think that acoup's point extends to most aspects of the military and to parts of civilian life as well. The complex, murky, and seemingly insane rulesets of command systems in Modern militaries is a feature, not a bug, though most people in it understandably disagree and are screaming at their screens right now. There's that old apocryphal quote that goes something like: war is chaos, which is why the Americans do so well in it, as they practice it on a daily basis.
Econtalk had a great bit on chaos in potato chip sales. Brendan O'Donohoe of Frito-Lay mentions that he randomly makes people take vacations, pulls them on to other projects, jazzes things up, so that his team can better sell potato chips. I've no idea of their internal numbers back in 2011, but based on his current LI, he's done alright enough since then (maybe, I really can't judge here)
https://www.econtalk.org/odonohoe-on-potato-chips-and-salty-...
My dad’s a doc (not in NY) and got sent home so he can be second wave.
Also, acoup's blog post does a really good job of going through the differences in Modern and Static military doctrines. Much better than my TLDR of it.
I think putting 1000 beds in a conference centre sounds a lot less dramatic than 4 new hospitals.
In NYC, there is very little space for something new. And the existing structures are poor locations for actual hospitals.
If the economy is going to be down for a while, might as well use a public space that is shut down for that purpose.
Those new temporary hospital units that they built in 2 weeks, are specialized, negative pressure rooms, that sucks the air out of the room, and runs it through a scrubbing filter, before safely expelling it outside into the atmosphere.
They learned their lesson from SARS, and built these special care units, to treat pulmonary infectious diseases.
These negative pressure rooms will help minimize infected air, such as when you do an intubation, and the virus get aerosolized, then it helps to vacuum the virus out of the air inside the room.
These hospitals were built to treat their most critical cases. Then, they later built general facilities in sporting stadiums, for milder cases, to keep these infected patients away from their families and the public, while they recovered. In retrospect, they should have built these two types of facilities in parallel. This appears to be a lesson learned for them. They underestimated the magnitude of the infection rate, and later realized that milder cases can be triaged and treated separately.
Granted, not a whole lot of information about this was shared in Western media; since most of the effort, was spent smearing China, and their terrible authoritarian government.
And whatever was reported was dumbed down for western audiences. This was frustrating when you wanted to find actual information, and you had to dig deeper, to find actual useful information about what was happening on the ground.
Note: As typical of HN readers, I’m expecting to get docked -4 points for this post, because I actually wrote something positive about China’s efforts to contain the coronavirus. In the end, apparently, it worked.
https://riverheadlocal.com/2020/03/22/as-suffolk-coronavirus...
I think the logistic complexity of building 4 field hospitals is like nothing compared building 30-40+ FOBs, MOBs, firebases, landing grounds, airfield, and other field logistic elements in the warzone, during an invasion.
Saying that, one need to think how shockingly bad the showing of American state apparatus been in recent years despite such an enormous resource at its disposal, unless the actual army is involved.
The rest of government generally only plans but never stress tests those plans. And the few times they do get practice, we rotate them out of those roles every time a new administration is voted in. Any SRE working at large tech companies like Facebook and Google probably have more experience responding to crises and correcting the shortcomings than many of the people on the civilian side of government.
I live in NYC with elderly family members as well as at-risk family members. I also have family in CA. My Friends are also in the same boat.
Unfortunately my business is critical so it will remain open though they are taking this very seriously. They have a rigorous cleaning policy as well as split shifting a crazy schedule to minimize people in the building at once yet moving production along. All office people who can work remote (not me, im tech) are home with laptops. Thankfully I have my own microwave and fridge in my pretty isolated office so im hunkering down there by myself. Only bringing food prepared at home which I have a little stock of. They also said I am free to hide all I want unless it's an emergency which is usually once a week when some old machine decides to throw a hissy fit.
This is one of the few respects in which military wastefulness is useful, since those capabilities are repurposable for zero-sum games played against nature.