In the mad dash to make up for a decades-long decline in overall medical capacity in the United States that has come into full relief during the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Army Corps of Engineers has had to step in and help create makeshift hospitals across the country so that people suffering from the disease can receive the treatment they need. 

As previously reported, states and local municipalities across the country are working to retrofit existing buildings, including bankrupt hospitals, empty convention centers, and increasingly, hotels, to meet the growing need for Intensive Care facilities. 

Those municipalities are largely putting into effect a plan developed by the Army Corps that was communicated in a press briefing given on Friday, March 20th via the US Army’s Twitter account. In the video, Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, Chief of the Army Corps, presents a conceptual plan crafted by his engineers that aims to convert existing hotels into “ICU-like” facilities. 

“This is an unbelievably complicated problem and theres no way we are going to be able to do this with a complicated solution,” Semonite states in the video, “We need something super simple. So our concept here is a standard design. This is the approved design—It’s already been through [Health and Human Services], briefed with members of the White House, and through [the Federal Emergency Management Agency].”

“We want to go into existing facilities primarily [...] hotels, college dormitories, and perhaps large spaces,” Semoite explains, while adding that through state-level efforts conducted in coordination with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Army Corp would set up short-term lease agreements with existing facilities in order to retrofit the structures “over a period of days” for intensive-care use. 

Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, Chief of the @USACEHQ, provides a 'simple' solution to the complicated problem of building temporary medical facilities to assist states with responding to #COVID19. This clip is from a press conference by Army senior leader on March 20, 2020. pic.twitter.com/HrASBfRSjz
— U.S. Army (@USArmy) March 21, 2020

Outlining the four-stage plan, Semonite said that in order to retrofit these buildings, “the Corp of Engineers has to be able to come in and [...] change the pressure in certain hotel rooms to be able to have a negative presure in a hotel room,” adding, “You [then] have to be able to put in the supplies ... [Health and Human Services] has come up with a list and every single hotel room would get the same amount supplies, it would just go in and it'd already be there [for medical providers to use] [...] The state [then] has to put the people in there, clean it, and train [the healthcare providers].” 

Semonite explained the basic premise of the plan: “Think of the second floor of a standard hotel. The room would be like a [standard] hotel room and we’d built nurses stations in the hall, and we would have all the equipment wirelessly going into the nurse’s stations so you can moitor how its going.”

Semonite explained that the Army Corps wants to “use New York as a standard setter” for the plan, adding that he had already met with Governor Cuomo to begin preparations for converting the Javits Center into such a temporary facility. 

“We did Javits Center yesterday, and we were in some the SUNY schools yesterday. Today, my engineers are walking through ten other buildings—five of those are hotel-like capabilities and five of those are open spaces—to be able to continue to figure out what those might look like,” he explained. “[We will] then we give this design to a contractor and [the contractor] site-adapts that design. If its a hotel with four floors, we change a little bit, if its got central air we change it, but bottom of the line is we’ve gotta do something very quick. Most of the governors are saying their peak is sometime in the middle of April, so this is not ‘take all the time in the world to do it,’ this is ‘what [are] just barely the most important things we have to do to come up with a good enough solution.”