Doctor here and I sent patients over there.

The Javits center was helpful because we needed beds. However since it wasn’t a hospital with all the associated services we had to restrict who could go to Javits center. Anyone who couldn’t walk couldn’t get transferred there. Neither could anyone who needed specialty consults. No children, no pregnant women. Nobody on a ventilator and anyone who looked like they would go on a vent we held in the hospital in case they crashed. So we offloaded a lot of the “healthier” patients there who just needed oxygen.

The USS Comfort was a hospital ship but they also had limitations. They required a complicated set of steps to do a hospital-to-hospital transfer of a patient, and they asked for no women or children and they had limited specialists; if you needed a cardiologist they shouldn’t get transferred.

In the end NY was able to flatten the curve and after a few weeks the need for both was lessened.