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She’s 70,000 tons of “You are not alone, New York”: The USNS Comfort arrived in New York harbor Monday morning, and what a fine sight it was.
The 1,000-bed hospital ship, now docked at Pier 90, with 12 operating rooms, 80 ICU beds and 1,200 medical personnel, will start taking patients aboard Tuesday. The plan is for her to handle non-corona cases, easing the load on the city’s regular hospitals.
Throngs of New Yorkers ignored social-distancing rules (sigh) to greet Comfort as she pulled into her berth near West 50th Street. However ill-advised, the spontaneous demonstration shows how much the city appreciates this tangible sign of the nation’s support.
Comfort is just the most obvious sign, though: The Federal Emergency Management Agency opened a 1,000-bed emergency hospital for coronavirus patients at the Javits Center on Monday, one of four such centers FEMA is providing. And the Christian humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse is deploying a 14-tent, 68-bed field hospital (including 10 ICU beds, plus ventilators) in Central Park’s East Meadow.
New York is also welcoming thousands of out-of-state and retired medical personnel, here to give some breathing room to near-exhausted frontline doctors, nurses, orderlies and so on.
The entrepreneur Elon Musk is donating hundreds of ventilators to the city. Ex-Knicks star Stephon Marbury, a Brooklyn native, is working with a Chinese manufacturer to deliver 10 million N95 masks. Even the United Nations donated 250,000 protective face masks to the city over the weekend.
And all that is just part of the waves of help on the way. The times are testing, but New York is not remotely on its own.
