Name: Defense Department silent as San Antonio asks for help in caring for COVID-19 patients
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Defense Department silent as San Antonio asks for help in caring for COVID-19 patients

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As the coronavirus pandemic squeezes San Antonio hospitals closer to capacity, Brooke Army Medical Center is sitting out the crisis.Even as military medical teams have arrived in the Alamo City to help at other facilities, the hospital at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston isn’t taking civilians sickened by the virus unless they’re military dependents or retirees.BAMC has cared for civilian trauma patients, however, since 1995. It’s an exception to a Pentagon policy that the state has asked to be extended to COVID-19 cases. There’s been no answer yet.“We need the Defense Department to do its part,” said Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who echoed others in saying BAMC leaders and personnel would like to help but have their hands tied by top Pentagon leaders.“The local brass and troops have always done a stellar job and continue to do so here during this pandemic, but I think we need the folks in DC to understand there’s no fence line in San Antonio,” Nirenberg said.A surge in COVID-19 patients has left only 11 percent of all staffed hospital beds available in the city as of Tuesday. Once those hospitals are full, two alternate sites are to open. The first would be the Texas Center for Infectious Disease, where COVID-19 patients were treated in the earliest days of the pandemic after being quarantined at JBSA-Lackland with other Americans evacuated from China and a pair of cruise ships.On ExpressNews.com:If necessary, a temporary hospital set up at Freeman Coliseum would take non-COVID patients who do not have to be isolated.Eric Epley, the executive director of the Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council, said that if the Pentagon could relax its policy, it would be “the simplest and the most effective way to take military teams and other teams that are coming into San Antonio and have them help us staff up BAMC.”Command staff at BAMC “would be anxious to help if they could,” said Epley, whose council oversees regional health care emergency planning.More for youMembers of Bexar County’s congressional delegation have raised the issue with the Defense Department, but a more formal appeal was made June 26 by the state on San Antonio’s behalf.The Texas Division of Emergency Management asked the Pentagon through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to allow BAMC “to temporarily participate in the STRAC regional response effort for COVID-19 patients,” division spokesman Seth Christensen said.“That request has been made and my understanding is that that is still with the office of the secretary of defense for the secretary of defense’s approval,” he said, adding that he didn’t know when it might be approved.Pentagon spokesmen have not responded to questions this week about the policy and the effort to change it.In San Antonio, a longstanding partnership allows military medical teams in BAMC’s emergency room to to provide trauma care to civilians, keeping skills sharp for the kinds of injuries troops in war zones suffer while easing the caseload at University Hospital, the city’s only other Level I trauma center.The medical center’s 8,500-strong staff provides inpatient and outpatient services to military members and dependents. Another 240,000 retiree beneficiaries from across the armed services also are eligible for care there. Like any military treatment facility or VA hospital, BAMC can’t treat other civilians except for trauma patients under its narrowly-tailored policy and persons granted a waiver by the secretary of defense.Officials at BAMC declined to say how many COVID-19 patients it had treated, citing operational security.On ExpressNews.com:The medical center typically can care for about 300 inpatients and currently has about 250, a spokesman there said, but its intensive care unit is nearly full, with 45 out of 50 staffed slots occupied. The ER sees about 4,500 trauma patients a year, whose care provides training for Army and Air Force medical personnel. An adjacent burn treatment center has 40 beds overseen by the U.S. Army Institute for Surgical Research.The city and state have worked to bring hundreds of additional nurses and other medical staff to help in hard-pressed hospitals here, including Army teams from Fort Carson, Colo.“I’m working on a request right now to ask for additional assistance, and it will include additional military support for all of Texas, but yes, for San Antonio as well,” said Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management.Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said more involvement by BAMC in helping with the coronavirus surge at other hospitals “would be a big help to us” if Pentagon officials there approve it, but recalled that no action was taken in Washington when Americans returning from Wuhan, China and two cruise ships turned up positive while in isolation Lackland.“So it’s not any different than it was back then - not that they didn’t want to, it was just that the big dogs in Washington wouldn’t let them,” Wolff said. “This is much more critical than that was.”Nirenberg pointed to the long marriage between San Antonio and the military as one reason for utilizing BAMC for COVID care, arguing that ties between the two are too close for the historic Army hospital to watch from the sidelines as the city fights to save thousands of sick patients, hundreds now in the ICU.“There’s no fence line in San Antonio with regard to our defense installations. We consider our service family San Antonians and we consider our San Antonians part of our service family, so this pandemic is not a question of uniform and non-uniform,” the mayor said. “We’re in this together.”covers the military and its impact in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. To read more from Sig, . | Twitter:

As the coronavirus pandemic squeezes San Antonio hospitals closer to capacity, Brooke Army Medical Center is sitting out the crisis.Even as military medical teams have arrived in the Alamo City to help at other facilities, the hospital at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston isn’t taking civilians sickened by the virus unless they’re military dependents or retirees.BAMC has cared for civilian trauma patients, however, since 1995. It’s an exception to a Pentagon policy that the state has asked to be extended to COVID-19 cases. There’s been no answer yet.“We need the Defense Department to...

Defense Department silent as San Antonio asks for help in caring for COVID-19 patients

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