Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Army Corps of Engineers are working to turn a major convention center into a 3,000-bed temporary hospital to treat infected patients.
Army Corps of Engineers Commanding General Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite said he hopes to have the 3,000 beds set up inside Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center by April 24. The Chicago Department of Public Health anticipates having 500 beds in the space by next week, and the convention center will be divided into three halls to treat patients based on the seriousness of their illness.
“The temporary health site at McCormick Place will function as a field hospital, providing a large quantity of beds, including 500 anticipated to come online in the coming week. We remain focused on working in partnership to build up resources and staffing for this site and across the system so that we can combat COVID-19, alleviate added stress to our hospitals and healthcare workers, and ensure patients across Chicago receive the care they need,” a statement from the Chicago Department of Health read.
Chicago Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady said the proposal to turn the convention center into a field hospital was not a “theoretical” exercise, and city officials warned that Chicago is likely to be hit hard in the coming weeks.
“We have some projections on when we think we will hit our peak,” Lightfoot told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s not a secret that most of them put them sometime in April, but what precise date, what date range, varies depending upon the model and the assumptions.”
Semonite said legislators in Chicago are working with officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services to create the makeshift hospital.
“This is really out of the box,” Semonite said Friday during an interview with Fox and Friends. “We knew we had a significant deficit of hospital beds. So, we said there is no way we can build hospitals in three weeks. We said we have got to take an existing facility with a standard design, let the HHS guys, let the FEMA guys, let all the docs take a look at it and once we have that, we are going to make four different options of how to apply that standard design either into a hotel or a dormitory or into a stadium or like a field house.”
