Increasing hospital capacity for Covid-19 crisis

Hospital capacity is likely come under severe pressure in the next few weeks. We need to increase our ability to isolate and treat all kinds of patients. Putting-up new buildings is out of the question.

What are the options?

In no particular order:

    1- Hotels
    2- Warehouses
    3- Hangars
    4- Military bases
    5- Sports arenas
    6- Convention centers
    7- Motor Homes/Trailers/Toy Haulers
    8- Containers
    9- Schools
   10- Cruise ships

I won't get into an in-depth analysis of each option. Just a few notes.

Out of these, I really like the idea of cruise ships. They have access to tens of thousands of rooms that can easily move to where they are needed. They come with a contained environment, bathrooms in every room, kitchens, large halls for staging, cargo space and even helipads in some cases.

At first I thought this would be a great idea to move non-COVID-19 non-critical patients in order to free-up hospital space for COVID-19 patients. In thinking about it some more, after becoming more informed, it seems that this could be a great idea for Corona-virus patients (at some level in the progression of the disease) because of a simple reason: They don't run the risk of infecting each other.

This means we could further protect hospital environments and capacity in order to be able to focus on those who need more attention and hospital facilities.

#7 is interesting. There are somewhere around ten million motor homes in the US. That is a massive number of beds that could be brought to aid in housing and dealing with this problem. Not sure about the logistics and compensation owners would receive, but it sure would be cheaper than attempting to build new hospital space.

Again, I like #10 better. We would help the industry financially and make use of great facilities.