Architects and engineers are turning old shipping containers into mobiled ICUs

Some containers come with their interior and moving parts slathered in Cosmoline and other toxic corrosion inhibitors. Others may have stored precursor chemicals to industrial adhesives or fertilizers. finally, theres no real regulation on what you can do with an over-iso (super heavy sticker) shipping container and many of them ship metals, or degraded plastics in various stages of recycling. Nuclear? sure. Walk through any port storage facility and theres sure to be a shipping container or two that will light up a geiger counter because the type-A containers inside have cracked from the heat and are leaking thorium tailings or other common low-level waste the USA ships out to third world countries and back.

As a basic structural shell, shipping containers are great - plentiful, compatible with global logistics, cheap, dense/stackable. But, to bring them up to habitable standards, let alone medical standards, takes A LOT of work. Hard manual labor and also precision assembly work. We have some custom equipment to help speed that retrofit process for our own purposes, but most container mod providers don't - so while yes, you can deploy finished units anywhere, stack them densely and connect them quickly, there isn't a reserve of these units standing by, and you have no scaling advantage up-front in manufacturing them right now.

I'll add that by the time you retrofit insulation, ventilation, utilities and paneling inside (and you have to put this inside if you want to maintain side-by-side stackability and weather impermeability) what was a "decent" small room size becomes a bit claustrophobic.

For modular, dense, deployable, and durable emergency hospital facilities, it's best to look at one of the many architectural prefab approaches - volumetric, panelized, or otherwise. See: BLOX, Blokable, FullStack Modular, Katerra, etc. This field is growing rapidly, and many of these companies are already tooled to produce room and structure modules very efficiently.

Some pose the question of re-tasking hotels as temporary alternative medical spaces. I could see it for housing medical staff in a more dedicated and perhaps centralized manner, if nearby a hospital. There are several military slide decks circulating around that describe exactly what's necessary to create a field hospital out of a hotel/office - including ripping up the carpet in the entire facility, heavily modifying HVAC (central or standalone units) etc - and that's all doable, but I've wondered about the implications afterwards. You'd have to basically rebuild the interiors entirely, battle future customer perception ("Oh, the hotel that 100 coronavirus patients died in?") and I'm certain the insurance situation will not be straightforward...

What's needed is more quarantine areas the size of Javits Center or Moscone Center, not shipping containers, which are essential for ending the lockdown.

One of the problems with the shipping container method are you're distributing the facilities maintenance tasks into a distributed system of multiple failure points.

Another is that if you do lose cooling, containers rapidly heat up in the daytime.

E.g. https://fortsusa.com/models/military/portable-military-shelt...

Since it could be mass manufactured offsite, and trucked in. Then they’d just have to assemble it onsite.

Then, they could ship it all over the world, to hotspots that needs emergency field help.

But it turned out, ocean transport time is horrendous. It takes 21 days to transport from China to Los Angeles. Then, the time to load the ship, and unload the ship, and transport by land to the actual hotspot, would add another week. Then the time to actually assemble it onsite would add a few more days. So now, you’re looking at over 30 days to build that emergency hospital. By which time, you’d already have a bunch of dead people, just because it took you too long to transport it.

So in retrospect, it was probably better that they built it modularly onsite instead. At least this way, you can still fly the components to your hotspot.

https://theprint.in/india/governance/rail-coach-as-icu-how-m...

Most related excerpts below:

‘A good idea’ According to media reports, a Kochi-based firm called Asset Homes had submitted a proposal to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) where it offered to fashion hospitals out of trains.

“We have 12,617 trains with 23-30 coaches in our country. We can easily convert them into ‘mobile hospitals’ with facilities like consultation rooms, medical store, ICU and pantry,” the firm’s managing director reportedly wrote in the letter.

“Each train can accommodate at least 1,000 beds. Using the 7,500+ railway stations, the patients can be admitted to the trains.”

A senior railway official said it was good idea to convert coaches into mobile isolation wards, but added that it would be easier to first convert the railways’ Accident Relief Medical Equipment Vans (ARME) — or rail ambulances — into isolation wards.

“These are basically moving hospitals meant to provide medical treatment and assistance in case of rail accidents,” the official said. “It might be easier to convert them into isolation wards since they already have some medical facilities.”

Among other steps taken to check the pandemic, the railways have been instructed to introduce isolation wards at railway hospitals.

At the moment a school in neighborhood is being demolished and a temporary container building was assembled as replacement. It’s very comfortable and nice inside, though school has vacation in summertime and this application is ok. ICU in a container might be good for Scandinavia or Alaska...