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Law360 (March 16, 2020, 8:54 PM EDT ) A Pentagon spokesperson said Monday the U.S. Department of Defense is "looking into" how fast the military can deploy portable tent hospitals to treat coronavirus patients, while a DOD official emphasized that those structures are designed to treat trauma care during combat and not to fight an infectious disease outbreak.
During a press conference at the Pentagon, Joint Staff Surgeon Brig. Gen. Dr. Paul Friedrichs, who is the medical adviser to the top U.S. general, said the DOD has 36 "relatively small" hospitals around the country, plus 10 deployable tent hospitals and a few empty hospital ships, which vary in capacity.
Although some of the deployable hospitals have hundreds of beds, Friedrichs said they were designed as trauma, acute and emergency care hospitals and they were not built to fight an outbreak of infectious diseases like COVID-19.
"The challenge is ... if we build a 200 bed or 25 bed trauma hospital to take care of people with the coronavirus, that's not really a great solution to the coronavirus challenge," Friedrichs said. "We don't have any 500 bed hospitals designed for infectious disease outbreaks — that does not exist in the inventory."
Even if the DOD deploys the tent and ship hospitals, Friedrichs said the military might not have the personnel to staff them and the military would have to rely on civilian doctors and nurses or the reserves, which he said could take away valuable staffing from local communities.
Friedrichs added that the DOD hasn't yet received any requests for the deployable hospitals, but it's trying to be careful about "not over-promising."
The discussion came during a press conference on how the DOD is responding to the coronavirus.
Pentagon spokesperson Jonathan Hoffman said the department is attempting to keep a "bubble" around its top two officials, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist, who are staying in separate rooms and communicating through video conference calls.
As of Monday morning, 18 service members had tested positive for the coronavirus, and as of Sunday, the DOD's 13 labs conducted 495 coronavirus tests globally, according to the officials.
Friedrichs also noted that no service member in Iraq or Afghanistan has tested positive for the coronavirus. But he said he didn't know how many individuals had been tested in those countries and acknowledged that the military in Afghanistan has to send coronavirus tests to Germany in order to get the results.
Hoffman and Friedrichs declined to give specific details about the number of ventilators the military has access to and the number of civilians and military personnel that the DOD predicts will become infected with the virus.
"We're going to leave the predictive modeling to the CDC," Hoffman said. "We're going to speak with one voice from the government on that."
On Saturday, Norquist signed an order halting all non-mission domestic travel until May 11, and service members are only authorized local leave. The government said the new policy is aimed at preventing the spread of coronavirus, since each day tens of thousands of service members and DOD civilians are traveling.
--Editing by Gemma Horowitz.
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