At the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, approximately 60 military medical personnel have been deploying in three, 20-person teams to support civilian healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients in local hospitals. Photo from U.S. Army North Public Affairs.
WASHINGTON — In response to the surge of COVID-19 cases related to the omicron variant, President Joe Biden said that an additional 1,000 military medical personnel would be available to aid civilian hospitals in the United States by early this year.
Biden directed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to provide military doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical personnel as needed.
Federal medical teams already are helping local hospitals. For example, U.S. Army North recently announced that, at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, about 60 military medical personnel would deploy in three, 20-person teams—two teams to Michigan and one team to New Mexico—to support civilian healthcare workers treating COVID-19 patients.
Those teams joined eight other teams which were working in five states—three in Montana, two in Minnesota, one in Colorado, one in Idaho and one in Utah. U.S. Army North, under U.S. Northern Command’s oversight, provides operational command of the teams.
“As COVID-19 hospitalization rates continue to shift across the country, decreasing in certain areas while increasing in others, we unfortunately find new communities and healthcare facilities overburdened and in need of federal, military assistance,” said Lt. Gen. John R. Evans Jr., ARNORTH commander. “The Department of Defense was again called upon by FEMA to support the New Mexico and the state of Michigan as they, along with the military and the entire nation, continue to fight this pandemic.”
The military medical personnel include nurses, respiratory therapists and medical doctors.
Shortly after Biden’s plans were revealed, Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby said at a press briefing, “We’ll work with FEMA; we’ll work with HHS; we’ll work with state and local authorities as appropriate to identify the right locations; the right hospitals that they need to go to; and then, of course, we’ll do the sourcing solutions and back that up, in terms of what the teams are going to look like, how many per team, where they’re going to be coming from. The plan is for them to come from the active duty ranks.”
Biden also announced that FEMA had been directed to activate additional staffing and capacity for the National Response Coordination Center (NRCC) and FEMA regions, and to mobilize planning teams to work with every state and territory to assess hospital needs ahead of winter COVID-19 surges, and to start expanding hospital bed capacity now—with the federal government picking up the paycheck.
The White House said that FEMA has already provided states hundreds of millions of dollars to expand hospital capacity. The agency also is ready to deploy hundreds of ambulances and emergency medical teams so that if one hospital fills up, they can transport patients to open beds in other facilities.
In terms of critical supplies, Biden said the U.S. government has hundreds of millions of N-95 masks, billions of gloves, tens of millions of gowns and more than 100,000 ventilators in the Strategic National Stockpile. Those are ready to ship out, if and when states need them, according to the White House, and many are pre-positioned in strategic locations across the United States so they can be delivered quickly.
