The Army Corps of Engineers has found a way to create negative pressure in large convention centers, thereby making it possible to house coronavirus and noncoronavirus patients and come closer to meeting the exploding demand for hospital beds across the country.
“We have a very, very narrow window of opportunity,” said Corps Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite Friday, describing a recurrent struggle to condense the time frames.
Semonite described a $75 million project at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago that will aid the effort in three halls with a capacity to hold 3,000 COVID patients. The deadline is April 24.
“We calculate, and we say, ‘That’s six weeks out. We can’t do that,’” he said. “I tell our guys, ‘You have three weeks. You get as much as you can get done in three weeks, and then, mission’s complete.”
Semonite took a Pentagon podium for the briefing an hour and half after stepping off a plane from New York City, where the Corps is retrofitting the Javits Center to host noncoronavirus patients.
“From an efficiency perspective,” he said, “it’s got to be the good enough solution, and Javits is the good enough solution.”
Semonite underscored that there is not enough time to build new hospitals but only to retrofit existing facilities to fit the needs of each city.
The Corps leader said he had a list of 114 sites and that 81 have already been assessed by the Corps, with assessments happening at a clip of about 15 to 20 per day. Deadlines and requirements for each city vary, but the Federal Emergency Management Agency is signing contracts every night, and the Corps is coordinating closely with the Department of Health and Human Services, he added.
In Sacramento, for example, a convention center with hard barrier walls will allow planners to create spaces for coronavirus and noncoronavirus patients in the same building.
“We’ve never done a pandemic capability,” he said, describing how four models are being used nationwide and even exported to Britain and Australia. “We don’t have on-the-shelf designs of how to modify hotels into COVID centers.”
Semonite said mayors and governors are maximizing all their resources, such as increasing the number of hospital beds allowable per room, and not just relying on the Corps to solve the bed shortage problem.
“When the ambulances come screaming down the street and they pull into the back of the hospital, whatever that facility is, and they’re taking somebody out that needs to go into a hospital bed, we don’t want the facility to be the critical [point],” he said.
