Gleaming new tent hospitals sit empty on two suburban New York college campuses, never having treated a single COVID-19 patient. Convention centers that were turned into temporary hospitals in other cities went mostly unused, and a US Navy hospital ship that offered help in Manhattan is soon to depart.
When virus infections slowed down or fell short of worst-case predictions, the globe was left dotted with dozens of barely used or unused field hospitals.
Some public officials have said that is a good problem to have — despite spending potentially billions of US dollars to erect the care centers — because it is a sign the deadly disease was not nearly as cataclysmic as it might have been.
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Many of the facilities would be kept on standby for a possible second wave of infections, while some could be repurposed as testing sites or recovery centers.
“It will count as a huge success for the whole country if we never have to use them,” said Simon Stevens, the chief executive of the UK’s National Health Service, where sparsely used field hospitals have been criticized as costly, unnecessary “white elephants.”
“But with further waves of coronavirus possible, it is important that we have these extra facilities in place and treating patients,” Stevens said.
In Italy and Spain, field hospitals were seen as crucial to relieving strain on emergency rooms as th disease exploded in March.
Those countries rank behind only the US for the largest number of infections and deaths, according to a Johns Hopkins University tally.
Spain built at least 16 field hospitals, ranging from a few beds under tents to one with more than 5,000 beds at Madrid’s big convention center.
That facility has treated more than 4,000 patients, accounting for 10 percent of the total infected population in the capital.
As the crisis eases and permanent hospitals are able to better manage the load, some of Spain’s field hospitals are scaling back or shutting down.
The Madrid facility halved its capacity and could close in two weeks if infection rates hold.
Spanish Minister of Health Salvador Illa said that the field hospitals have been important and in some cases “essential.”
For all the successes, there have also been missteps.
In Milan, in Italy’s hardest-hit region, a field hospital funded with 21 million euros (US$23 million) in private donations came too late and was built too far from the city center to help.
The 200-bed hospital, put up in less than two weeks at a conference center on the outskirts of town, opened to great fanfare on March 31, but by then pressure on the region’s intensive care units was already starting to fall. It has treated only a few dozen patients.
Italy’s national civil protection agency opposed the plan from the start, arguing it could never equip the facility with ventilators or personnel in time. Still, the regional governor, a member of a rival political party, forged ahead.
“We had to ... prepare a dam in case the epidemic overcame the embankment,” Lombardy Governor Attilio Fontana told Italian all-news station Radio 24.
In Berlin, construction and hiring are continuing at a 1,000-bed field hospital dubbed the Corona Center.
The project has advanced despite a glut of available hospital beds in the German capital, leading to questions about its usefulness and the 90 million euros it has cost so far.
In New York, the hardest-hit state in the US with nearly 300,000 cases and more than 18,000 deaths, Governor Andrew Cuomo has used the mantra “plan for the worst, hope for the best” to defend his push for field hospitals that have, so far, gone largely unused.
With projections in mid-March that the state would need to double hospital capacity to 110,000 beds by the end of last month, Cuomo asked the US Army Corps of Engineers to build at least four field hospitals and the navy to deploy hospital ship USNS Comfort to Manhattan.
With hospitalizations cresting far below forecasts, at 18,825 on April 12, just one of the Army Corps-built temporary facilities opened, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City. It is to close tomorrow after treating little more than 1,000 patients.
The three other field hospitals that Cuomo requested were completed and mothballed for possible future use, including ones on the campuses of Stony Brook University and the State University of New York College at Old Westbury on Long Island.
Plans for four other field hospitals were scrapped, and the Comfort is set to leave today.
The US Army Corps of Engineers paid construction firms US$136 million to build the Stony Brook facility and US$116.5 million to build the one on the Old Westbury campus, federal contracting data shows.
It gave out at least US$100 million in contracts for since-canceled hospitals at a horse racing track and a city park.
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