What the US military could and couldn’t do in the fight against coronavirus

Many pundits and politicians have been asking why the US military isn’t doing more to help combat the spread of coronavirus in the United States.

In a New York Times op-ed Sunday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called on President Donald Trump to use the Army Corps of Engineers to add more medical facilities, and late last week, former Vice President Joe Biden said the Department of Defense should be planning to deploy.

But even though some National Guard units have been involved in helping with the logistics and planning of the coronavirus response at the state level, the US military’s capacity to provide medical support is limited.

There are 51 military hospitals compared to some 6,000 civilian hospitals nationwide, according to one US defense official, meaning the US military has only about 1% of the nation’s hospital capacity. Military hospitals admit many fewer patients per year than do civilian hospitals. While the US military does also have 424 medical clinics, hospital ships such as the USNS Comfort, and the ability to construct field hospitals, those facilities are not ideal for treating persons in isolation care who must be quarantined. Hospital ships, for example, treat their patients in open bays.

While calls for the military to aid in the US response to the pandemic have increased in recent days, defense officials say their first priority is maintaining the health, welfare and “readiness” of the 1.36 million members of the active duty military, as well as the 800,000 members of the National Guard and Reservists in addition to some 730,000 civilian employees in the Department of Defense.

A defense official said that while the Pentagon could provide some surge capacity to help civilian authorities combat the crisis, there would be tradeoffs in the areas of force readiness.

The official said that although the Department of Defense wants to help out where it can, they believe that will primarily be in the area of logistics support as opposed to medical care given the capacity limitation in their own facilities.

In his Sunday op-ed, Cuomo also said that Trump should ease Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regulations to make it easier for testing to occur across the country and called for “a uniform federal standard for when cities and states should shut down commerce and schools, or cancel events.”

“Mr. Trump, don’t let bureaucracy get in the way of fighting this virus. Break the logjam, let states fully take over testing so they can unleash hundreds of labs tomorrow and bring testing to scale,” he wrote. “It is the only way we will have a chance of keeping up with the rapid spread of this contagion.”

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment on the piece.

New York has become a center of attention during the pandemic, with 524 known cases and one death reported across the state. Cuomo had directed that events in New York with more than 500 people be canceled or postponed, while in suburban New Rochelle, officials put into effect a 1-mile containment zone after the town was found to be a coronavirus cluster.

As of Sunday afternoon, there were at least 3,130 cases cases of coronavirus in the US and the disease had resulted in at least 62 deaths, according to figures from state and local health agencies, governments and the CDC.