Cuomo says New York followed federal guidelines when sending coronavirus patients to nursing homes

[AtheistCrusader]

44. They were not allowed to. The Federal Government controls the Comfort and Mercy, and they were

in place only to accept normal trauma cases. Broken bones, gunshot wounds, things like that. (Things that military doctors are actually really good at handling.)

This policy barrier made the ships useless. Before entering the ship, you had to test negative for Covid-19. This isn't a super useful thing to require, when someone is bleeding out in front of you.

Trump wins multiple ways on this one. All kinds of manufactured fanfare about the ships being deployed. Never mind that they were under-staffed and under-equipped, being mid-refit when they got the orders to go. Because of the constraints on their use, they didn't actually have to help anyone, which is apparently Trump's prime directive. And when they left, under-utilized, Trump gets to blame the states that 'didn't use them' and or 'clearly didn't need them'.

Donald Trump's reality distortion field is, frankly, astounding. It's always JUST ENOUGH to please his base, even if it means thousands of dead. Think about how the headlines play; 'tens of thousands of new yorkers dead'. How does that play to a red-hat-wearing trump supporter? New York is a solidly blue state. Swap 'new yorkers' with 'liberals', and then you can probably sense the glee such a person would feel, reading that headline. They simply aren't playing the same game the rest of us are. Their motives are alien to ours.

Anyway, here's an article why the Comfort and Mercy were nothing more than Trump publicity stunts, that he totally got away with. Edit: The criteria I described above was the 'early' plan for using these ships, and the military field hospitals. That they would take the normal trauma stuff, and the hospitals could focus on Covid-19 victims. By the time this article below was written, the policy started to change to include Covid victims, but as you will see, they constrained the transfer of patients so much, it still didn't matter.
https://nypost.com/2020/04/09/usns-comfort-and-javits-center-mostly-empty-amid-coronavirus/