In an effort to rapidly boost effective medical response to the devastating COVID-19 outbreak, an international network of architects, engineers, doctors, military experts, and NGOs have developed an open-source solution to convert shipping containers into plug-in Intensive-Care Units. A first prototype is currently being developed in Milan, Italy where the pandemic has hit especially hard.
The project, called CURA (Connected Units for Respiratory Ailments, and also "cure" in Latin), was initiated by Italian architect, engineer, and director of MIT's Senseable City Lab Carlo Ratti with fellow Italian architect Italo Rota.
"CURA is a compact Intensive-Care pod for patients with respiratory infections, hosted in a 20-foot intermodal container with biocontainment (thanks to negative pressure)," explains the project description. "Each unit works autonomously and can be shipped anywhere. Individual pods are connected by an inflatable structure to create multiple modular configurations (from 4 beds to over 40), which can be deployed in just a few hours. Some pods can be placed in proximity to a hospital (e.g. in parking lots) to expand the ICU capacity, while others could be used to create self-standing field hospitals of varying sizes."
"CURA aims to improve the efficiency of existing solutions in the design of field hospitals, tailoring them to the current pandemic. In the last weeks, hospitals in the countries most affected by COVID-19, from China to Italy, Spain to the USA, have been struggling to increase their ICU capacity to admit a growing number of patients with severe respiratory diseases, in need of ventilators. Whatever the evolution of this pandemic, it is expected that more ICUs will be needed internationally in the next few months."
"The response to the emergency in China and Italy so far has been to set up makeshift emergency hospitals such as tents, or build new prefabricated wards with biocontainment. While the latter option is time and resource-intensive, the former one exposes medical professionals to a higher risk of contamination and adds operational strain, especially in the long run."
"Learning from both approaches, CURA strives to be as fast to mount as a hospital tent, but as safe as a hospital’s isolation ward to work in, thanks to biocontainment (an extractor creates indoor negative pressure, complying with the standards of Airborne Infection Isolation Rooms AIIRs). It follows the standards for COVID-19 hospitals issued by the Chinese authorities, while speeding up execution. Each CURA pod would contain all the medical equipment needed for two COVID-19 intensive-care patients – including ventilators and intravenous fluids stands. All units can be connected by an inflatable corridor."
The list of collaborating contributors to the CURA project includes (in chronological order): CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati with Italo Rota (Design and Innovation), Humanitas Research Hospital (Medical Engineering), Policlinico di Milano (Medical Consultancy), Jacobs (Alberto Riva - Master Planning, design, construction and logistics support services), studio FM milano (Visual identity & graphic design), Squint/opera (Digital media), Alex Neame of Team Rubicon UK (Logistics), Ivan Pavanello of Projema (MEP Engineering), Dr. Maurizio Lanfranco of Ospedale Cottolengo (Medical Consultancy), with support from the World Economic Forum: COVID-19 Action Platform and Cities, Infrastructure and Urban Services Platform.
For the proper response to shipping container hospitals please follow @markasauras on Twitter:
All 4 Comments
When all you have is a hammer...
You gotta admit, those are nice ass coffins; lotsa room.
so I googled it, there are rough rough estimates of 15million to 170 million shipping containers in circulation.
For the proper response to shipping container hospitals please follow @markasauras on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/markasaurus/status/1244854113990393857
And these "rooms" and diagrams referenced in the article are both woefully inadequate, as they seem to only account for able bodied, and not those who are not and those who are morbidly obese. It's almost like they're telegraphing where the cut-off point is for what it means to be worthy of survival.
Leave it to architects to find every excuse under the sun to repurpose the shopping container.
Nice publicity, beautiful graphics but no substance, totally inadequate and nonfunctional...
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