Javits, Comfort Should Treat Coronavirus Patients: Councilman

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — The thousands of hospital beds created in the Javits Center and by the arrival of the USNS Comfort should be used to help local hospitals discharge coronavirus patients from their facilities, the chair of the New York City Council's health committee said Tuesday.

City Councilmember Mark Levine cited an increasing number of acutely ill coronavirus patients coming into New York City hospitals as a reason why the federal facilities should not bar patients suffering the deadly virus. Local hospitals are having difficulties discharging patients from their intensive care units, but could receive serious help with the use of the 3,500 new beds at Javits and the Comfort.

“Every element of the city’s healthcare system is under unprecedented strain,” Levine said in a statement. “The mounting overflow we are seeing in city hospitals is a simple math problem: more COVID-19 patients are coming in than are being discharged. Hospitals need to be able to discharge COVID-19 patients who are no longer critical, but currently, there is nowhere for these recovering patients to be discharged to."

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said that the hospitals at Javits and the Comfort will take in overflow cases of non-coronavirus patients from city hospitals. It's an approach Levine calls "unsustainable."

“There are still huge numbers of recovering patients that can and need to be rotated out to a lower level of care. We need the beds on the Comfort and in the Javits Center to serve as surge beds for these COVID-19 patients coming out of ICU," Levine said.

Levine announced earlier this month that he likely fell ill with coronavirus but refused to get a test as to not overwhelm the city's healthcare system. Levine — who represents parts of the Upper West Side, Harlem and Washington Heights — said last week that he had a fever and a dry cough and assumed that he had coronavirus.

The death toll from the new coronavirus neared 1,000 people in New York City Tuesday, city health officials announced. Despite leading the nation in confirmed coronavirus cases, Mayor Bill de Balsio said the stagger number only represents a fraction of the actual amount of people sickened as the city can only test people who fall critically ill.

Latest city figures show there were 38,087 cases that had tested positive in the city as of Monday evening. Of them, 914 had died. Both the mayor and Governor Andrew Cuomo have said they expect those numbers to worsen over the next couple of weeks.

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