Early Friday morning, the USNS Mercy reached port in Los Angeles to provide relief to local hospitals overwhelmed by coronavirus patients. Yahoo! Finance's Melody Hahm joins The Final Round to discuss.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: On that topic, let's bring in Melody Hahm now. And Melody, for kind of a look at your conversation with the Commanding Officer of the Navy Mercy ship, that health ship that's being spent I think down to San Diego right now, as we try to find ways-- we're scrambling as a nation to find ways to expand the capacity of our health care system.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, just to clarify, Myles, the ship left San Diego on Monday and arrived to the Port of Los Angeles this morning around 9:00 AM local time here. And it will be fully operational and open to take patients starting tomorrow, as the commanding officer, John Rotruck, did tell me in a phone conversation yesterday. I want to clarify here that it's for non-COVID-19 patients.

This is essentially serving as an overflow hospital. It has to be through a transfer from an existing hospital in the LA region. And there will be two units that are not included with care. That's pediatrics and obstetrics. But all other sorts of acute trauma care will be taken care of on this hospital.

You can imagine that the demand will be high, although the captain did not clarify on the amount of patients that he has kind of backlogged and on a waiting list. I want to play a clip from our conversation, where he talked about the process and sort of the expediency and swiftness with which they act.

JOHN ROTRUCK: Our doctrine is actually to be able to activate the ship on five days from order. And that's actually what we did in this case. So there is a full-time crew of 61 who maintain the ship in that state of readiness to activate in five days.

We did it in five days and brought on all the extra folks, as well as quite a bit of consumables, both food and medical supplies, and together with our civilian mariner colleagues, we were able to get under way as scheduled.

MELODY HAHM: And Myles, to give you some more numbers here, there are 1,000 new hospital beds on this ship. We know that the counterpart, the sister ship Comfort is actually leaving Norfolk, Virginia tomorrow. And President Trump is actually expected to be there, kind of sending that ship off to New York City. There will be 1,200 beds on that ship. So as you can imagine, with a lot of these patients kind of being ousted or sidelined amid a lot of these hospital beds being needed for these COVID-19 patients, this will be a necessary sort of piecemeal solution.

I also want to point out that I asked about the supply chain system. And the captain said essentially, they are going through the exact same chain as a lot of the hospitals, commercial hospitals around here. Although, of course, there's a stipulation that the Department of Defense can provide additional things, and they could be at the top of the list if they need extra masks and gloves and hand sanitizers and the like.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, and Melody, it's interesting, you just mentioned it's something we think more about now, but really didn't hit home for-- certainly not for me, and I think many others in the last couple of weeks, is that people still have heart attacks. And people still get sick. And, I mean, I know they can cancel elective surgeries, but there are still people who are critically ill who don't have COVID-19.

And that's part of why the system is so stressed. And it's interesting, this hospital is basically for-- I guess we could call them the normal sick people who are not--

MELODY HAHM: Exactly.

MYLES UDLAND: --a part of this. And that part of the health system doesn't just go away. And I think, again, we're all starting to understand just how close to capacity we typically run the health care system and how little ability we're having right now to deal with the fallout from this.