Key Pentagon officials are warning the military might not have the personnel or the facilities to fully support civilian anti-coronavirus efforts, but the Department of Defense is ready to help "to the greatest extent possible" with the direction of President Donald Trump.
"We just want to make sure that the conversation that is being had is informed by the facts of what is possible, what is not, and what those trade-offs are," Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters at a Monday briefing, reports Newsweek.
Both he and Joint Staff Surgeon Air Force Brigadier General Paul Friedrichs stressed the military's medical infrastructure will mean efforts to help the civilian public will be limited, and trade-offs will come into play.
Some state officials have suggested the military opens its hospitals to help alleviate civilian overflow when the numbers of coronavirus cases start to grow in upcoming weeks and months. Hoffman, however, said the Pentagon's holdings equal just 2% to 3% of the beds in the private sector.
The DOD does have 36 hospitals nationwide, said Friedrichs, but most are not configured to support large numbers of patients suffering from the virus, especially since many of them will be elderly people.
Instead, most of the hospitals are small community facilities that are configured more to support the military's immediate needs, including caring for active-duty and retired members of the military and their families.
Deployable and tent hospitals, and the military doctors that staff them, are aimed toward trauma and combat casualties, not caring for people with infectious diseases like the coronaviruses, and such facilities typically deal with a younger population, not the elderly, said Hoffman.
Freidrichs also said, even though the National Guard and Medical Reserve Corps could be used to add to medical staff, that would leave communities without coverage.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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