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A top US Army commander is visiting New York on Sunday to determine if the military will send more medical personnel to relieve weary Big Apple doctors and nurses battling the coronavirus — but the relief is far from guaranteed because other cities will need help as their outbreaks peak, The Post has learned.
“Lieutenant General Laura Richardson is coming here and she’s going to look at it,” FEMA Regional Director and former FDNY Commissioner Thomas Von Essen told The Post.
“She’s a doctor also. She’s got to try to evaluate it and talk to everybody and see what the needs are. If we need more, and she wants more, and it’s justified, I’m sure she’ll try to help and if not we can figure out other ways,” Von Essen said.
Lt. General Richardson, who will visit the makeshift military hospital at the Javits Center, may very well decide that “it would be better to have the military ready for other places,” Von Essen said in an exclusive interview.
The feds “are concerned about that going forward,” given that New York has already received “unprecedented” support, Von Essen said.

An Army spokesman did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
About 400 medical military personnel stationed at Javits, which has a capacity of 1,000 beds but just over 300 patients because of strict admissions criteria, are deploying around the five boroughs to relieve staff of the city’s 11 public hospitals until the convention center fills up, Von Essen said.
At the same time Von Essen, who led the FDNY during the 9/11 terror attacks, said his biggest concern for New York City is the overwhelming of emergency-department docs and nurses.
“We don’t know how much longer they can keep it that up. They’ve been doing it over a month. We may have a month to go even though we see a decrease in hospital admissions which is a great sign. We do see an increase in deaths because it takes a couple of weeks for folks to go through that whole horrible illness then survive or not,” he said.
Relief for front-line medical workers is also a top concern for Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“The mayor has been clear we need all the military personnel we can get, and we’re thankful for everyone who has come to help us so far. New York City is at the center of this crisis. Help us today and we will help you tomorrow,” his spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein told The Post.

A second pressing problem is the

shortage of sedation medications

needed to intubate coronavirus patients, Von Essen said.

“We’re having difficulty getting those. We’re working on trying to fix that through a supply chain issue,” he said.

The feds are currently flying planes to China and India to pick up thousands of doses of the drugs, instead of waiting the 2-3 weeks it normally takes for the supplies to arrive by ship, Von Essen said.

Von Essen predicted the biggest challenge facing New Yorkers in the coming weeks and months will be the drawn-out process of fully overcoming the outbreak.

“It’s not going to just end like the problem solved. It’s going to be a continuation of trying to keep people who might be infected away from other people who might not be infected,” Von Essen said.

“I think it’s going to be hard for people. I mean you might not be able to go to a baseball game, you might not be able to do things you really used to do and I think everybody’s waiting for that curtain to rise so they can all run out of the house and go back to normal. And I don’t know what normal is going to be in front of us this spring and this summer,” Von Essen said.
“Even as these deaths decrease, it doesn’t mean that the virus has disappeared,” he said.