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Comment by throwaway292893 | Hacker News Reader

There was a hospital ship he could have used, it only had 179 patients over 3 weeks. There were hospitals made that never reached full capacity. Hell, setup a tent. You're saying the only option was to infect and kill 15,000 people?

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Hospitals did in fact need the beds (nursing home beds >>> hospital beds). Additionally they are ill-equipped for the skilled help these people needed. People suffer from dementia/alzheimers and hospitals only option is to handcuff people to their beds (which is inhumane long-term).

I don't want to play politics and I do think more could have been done here). Like: quickly granting nursing homes aid in terms of PPE + cash + national guard help. I'm just trying to change your mind that the situation was much more nuanced that the NYTimes is advocating for.

The hospital ships weren't for covid patients, but for others who couldn't get a bed due to the hospitals being over capacity. The military specifically was testing everyone coming to make sure they didn't have covid because it can spread way faster in the confines of a ship.

That was true initially, but they changed tack about a week later. The ship reduced capacity from 1000 beds to 500 specifically so that they could accomodate covid patients, because there weren't enough other patients to matter. In addition, the Javits center field hospital never reached more than about 5% of its available capacity. Meanwhile the nursing home down the street from me was begging the city to let them send their covid positive residents to to the ship, or to the javits, were told that those were only for hospital overflow, and they should keep the residents in place. more than 60 of them died, the highest death toll of any nursing home in the state.

The point is those ships were under capacity the whole time.

Send more non-covid patients to them, keep elderly patients in the hospitals. New York never reached full capacity overall.

If you MUST send covid patients to nursing homes, make sure they are prepared with PPE.

Other states did so, Cuomo and the 5 other governors should have known to do so. We already had outbreaks in a nursing home that everyone was aware of.

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