Dr. Oz Warns Of Weak Link Fighting Pandemic

Dr. Mehmet Oz warned that the health of America's doctors and nurses and the integrity of the nation's hospitals must be safeguarded to ensure that the country can effectively combat the coronavirus outbreak, Fox News reports.

"The weak link fighting a pandemic is when the hospitals get sick," said Oz, host of the "The Dr. Oz Show” and an attending physician at New York Presbyterian-Columbia Medical Center.

"When the nurses and doctors are ill, when everyone who goes to the hospital feels ill, no longer is it 'hospital.' It becomes 'hospice.' You go there to die. And that's a catastrophe," he said on Fox Nation's new special "Five Flus."

In "Five Flus," Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner and some of the world's leading medical doctors and infectious disease experts looked back at the worst flu outbreaks: the Spanish flu (1918), the Asian flu (1957), the Hong Kong flu (1967-68) and the Swine flu (1976) to discern what lessons can be learned to save lives today.

Oz observed that during the Spanish flu of 1918, considered to be one of the world's worst natural disasters, hospitals were overwhelmed.

10/3/1918

"That ended up happening in 1918 more than we wanted to acknowledge," he said, "because there wasn't the ability to take care of large numbers of sick people."

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Monday that he is deploying the New York National Guard to make preparations to build emergency hospital spaces, and he called on President Donald Trump to use the the Army Corps of Engineers for the same purpose.