ne of the Navy's massive floating hospitals, the USNS Comfort, is headed to New York after Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio said hospitals across the city and state were about to be overwhelmed by thousands of critically ill coronavirus patients.

"The president will dispatch the Comfort to us to NYC Harbor," Cuomo said.

"They're getting ready to go to New York," Trump said. "I spoke to Governor Cuomo about it. He's excited about it."

Back in 2010, I boarded the Comfort in the waters off of Haiti after it was dispatched to treat people critically injured in the devastating earthquake there.  

"Sir, this is a fully functional hospital at sea," said Lieutenant Commander Dan Durora, an emergency trauma nurse. "We can do anything here on this ship. We have all kinds of surgeons and physicians, and what we do is that we bring them in and we triage them based on their condition of severity, how long they have had their injury, and they get priority based on that."

The Comfort can treat up to 1,000 patients at a time. It's expected the ship will be used to treat non-coronavirus patients. That will free up more space in New York hospitals to treat victims of the coronavirus.

At the time of our interview, there were more than 400 medical staff members on board.

"This is what we are here to do, and we all signed up to do it, and we are happy to do it," said Sheila Almendras-Flaherty, a nurse. 

And with all of the abilities of a hospital on land including 12 operating rooms, this ship has been around the world, as I found out. 

"I'm the lead translator, I'm helping to organize all the translators on board and getting the mission done," said translator Dietrich Rey. "I speak French, Creole, a little bit of Italian and a little bit of Spanish."

Several staff members we interviewed on the ship in 2010 were from New York City - a city that now needs the help of the Comfort.