USNS Comfort has 20 patients
No COVID patients allowed. All patients must be first sent to a hospital, tested negative for COVID, and then sent to the hospital ship. The ship is not set up for COVID treatment as of the writing of this article.
The cases they can treat are much less prevalent — “stay inside” orders have reduced car accidents, construction accidents, violence, and other “normal” incidents requiring hospitalization. No orders have been made to prep the ship for COVID patients. So...1000 hospital beds on a boat sit empty in NY Harbor while doctors and nurses are wearing NY Yankees rain ponchos as PPE.
Meanwhile...
Critical anesthetics and respiratory easing drugs in short supply, high demand.
The drugs that are essential for easing the breathing of COVID patients, and for calming, anesthetizing, and otherwise immobilizing those who need to be intubated are running out.
“Just in time” production of these drugs in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry (and the fact that many manufacturers are overseas) has resulted in a lack of supply at the moment of most critical need.
Keep in mind: this is happening now … this is the start of the crisis, and only NY City has been really heavily hit. Just wait until Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, DC, Miami, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston, Dallas, Austin, St. Louis, Kansas City… and the rest of the South, Southeast, and Mid-West “catch up” … which they will be doing in spades in short order.
Inescapable interpretation...
Capitalism is a murder/suicide pact. Unregulated trans-national capitalism gave rise to the conditions that led to zoonosis and emergence of this virus. Unregulated trans-national capitalism has created a supply chain that is weak, and lacks any resilience. Imperialism and Capitalism founded on massive military spending to protect cheap labor and raw materials extraction in the “periphery” has sunk enormous sums of money and hard capital into equipment we cannot use when we need it.
And don’t forget…
Fire season is coming to the western states. Flood season is in full swing. Hurricane season is coming to the Atlantic Basin and the Gulf.
Not to mention...
That plowing, fertilization, planting, tending, and pollinating season is now upon us. Hundreds of thousands of foreign “guest workers” are not coming across our borders right now. And millions of domestic farm workers, internal migrants, and seasonal laborers are among the most vulnerable, lowest paid, least covered workers in our society, often living in crowded, unsanitary, and unhealthy conditions.
This summer may well be … interesting.
For your reading pleasure:
1) Vintage Season (Moore and Kuttner, writing as "Lawrence O'Donnell)
2) The Marching Morons, by C.M. Kornbluth
Happy Thursday.