Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed that more than a thousand additional doctors and nurses will be sent to New York to help the city as it struggles to contain the coronavirus outbreak.
“What we plan on doing now is to point over 1,100 additional doctors and nurses and other medical professionals to New York. The bulk of them will go to the Javits Center, and then as of late yesterday we agreed to deploy a few hundred of them to 11 New York City hospitals that are also seeing a deficiency when it comes to medical staff,” Esper said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“We will soon be taking over the Javits Center – a 2,500-bed capacity – to show you how all in we are,” he continued. “The United States military will soon be running the largest hospital in the United States.”
Speaking at the White House’s coronavirus task force briefing on Saturday, President Trump promised the military was on its way to the Big Apple.
“At my direction, 1,000 military personnel are deploying to New York City to assist where they’re needed the most,” he said. “That’s the hottest of all the hot spots.”
Esper was responding to comments made Friday by Mayor Bill de Blasio calling for a “national mobilization” of health-care workers as the peak of the outbreak has yet to hit the Big Apple and urged the Trump administration for direct military intervention.
“This country is not on wartime footing,” the mayor said. “The military are at their bases; they are not at the front. And we have medical professionals [in other states] going about their normal lives.”
“This is a war,” he continued. “Let’s treat it as a war.”
The city had more than 63,000 cases as of late Saturday.
More than 2,600 people have died because of the virus.
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