Biden: Pentagon to deploy 1,000 more troops help with COVID-19 spike

The White House has instructed the Pentagon to mobilize 1,000 additional service members to help at medical facilities across the country early next year as part of a larger plan to fight the recent surge of COVID-19 cases.

President Biden said in speech Tuesday that 1,000 military medical personnel will help at hospitals overwhelmed and burned out by staffing shortages and a crush of unvaccinated coronavirus patients health officials anticipate in January and February. 

The personnel will join some 300 military doctors, nurses, paramedics and other medical personnel deployed since the start of the discovery of the omicron variant last month to 12 hospitals in seven states: Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

Biden did not say where the additional 1,000 service members will come from or where they will be sent. Earlier Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the Defense Department is working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to figure out those details.

“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,” Kirby told reporters at the Pentagon.

Kirby added that the plan is for the medical personnel to come from the active-duty ranks.

The move comes as the nation’s hospitals have come under strain due to an influx of coronavirus patients, the vast majority of whom are unvaccinated. 

The onslaught of COVID-19 cases has prompted the White House to plan several actions meant to increase vaccinations and curtail the spread of the virus, but Biden has stressed he won’t seek any new lockdowns or pandemic-related restrictions.

As part of those efforts, Biden on Tuesday said the administration is also planning to buy 500 million COVID-19 testing kits for free distribution to Americans and will set up new federal testing sites around the country starting this month.

The move comes as roughly 50 million people in the U.S. have contracted the coronavirus and more than 800,000 people in the U.S. have died from the coronavirus since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.