Hacker News Reader

Comment by redis_mlc | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like another half-baked "gotta do something" project.

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.

View on HN

There's a group of people who seem to see shipping containers as the solution to every problem.

Thanks, I needed a laugh!

The Orbis plane, used in serial eye surgeries, works better than containers because:

1) the patients are only in the plane for minutes, not weeks

2) It's the only reasonable way to get specialists and their specialized instruments into areas short on both staff and equipment.

3) Most countries leave aircraft alone at an active airport. Anything else shipped can get looted.

The current plane is a former Fedex MD-10.

https://www.orbis.org/en/what-we-do/flying-eye-hospital

They can just temporarily convert hotels, which are underused at the moment with the effective collapse of most traveling, tourism and business trips. Hotels have good rooms, air conditioning, power, and are fairly controlled environments.

And they have a lot of the supporting facilities and infrastructure you need in order to run a medical facility (kitchen, laundry, plumbing and locally controllable HVAC to every room, etc). It's way easier to rip out carpet than it is to add all that stuff to containers.

If you wanted to have cheap and easily deliverable ICUs you're probably better starting off with RVs since those are already designed around all the stuff you need to make a habitable space. Containers are great for transporting many at a time over a long distance because they stack and are also designed to facilitate fast and easy inter-modal handling (which is why the military uses them for certain facilities). Once a containers are within a few hundred miles of its destination they tend to move one (40+ft) or two (20-25ft pup trailers) at a time by truck which is the same method of transportation used for RVs (one behind a small truck or two on a flat bed behind a larger truck). Unless someone is assembling container ICUs in massive volume and shipping them across an ocean or rail transporting them across a continent I would be very, very surprised if the extra resources required to convert and ship containers to hospital rooms is lesser than the effort required to convert (and ship if applicable) existing hotels, RVs or any other structure already equipped for living in into hospital rooms.

Wouldn’t central air without HEPA filtration be an issue in a hotel setting? I don’t think it’s easy to retrofit (it can be done but not quick and cheap).

Most hotels don't have central air per say, at least in the room. Each room has one of those standalone units usually near the window.

I can't find the clip right now but in one of NY Gov Cuomo's briefings they had an guy from (I think from the Engineers Corps) talk about this.

This one https://twitter.com/USArmy/status/1241185656094801923

That makes sense. If you have the army corps of engineers on your side then yeah, those obstacles are overcome.

Can this dude just be the spokesperson for everything during this pandemic? Clear, concise, no bullshit straight to the point. Here is the issue, here is the plan, here is what we're doing.

They're called packaged terminal air conditioners:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaged_terminal_air_conditio...

>>"Sounds like another half-baked "gotta do something" project."

Almost everything starts with a "gotta do something".

I understand what you are saying, this will be probably useless for the current crisis, but, who knows what could come from this kind of projects on the long term?

Maybe in a few years there will be an Open Source library of proved medical devices available to everybody.

> Almost everything starts with a "gotta do something".

Not in regulated industries in 2020. Anything that resembles a medical device will need approval, and gobs of cash.

So far I don't think DIY ventilators or containers make any sense (ie. meet FDA approval), but homemade face masks seem ok.

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

A single mini-split can easily cool a container even in 120 degree heat. Maybe you're talking about 15,000 BTUs instead of 10,000 for very well-insulated traditional structure. But that's like a $300 difference. And right now, energy is dirt cheap.

Cooling fails though. And even in 70 degree heat a 55-foot container can hit 110 in the sun, as I learned lumping boxes one summer.

Yeah, it seems like we have people with a lot of energy and even with some knowledge but without overall organization, those resources go to waste.

And altogether, we suffering, people are dying, through the lack of coherent, overall planning. The problem is a lot of institutions and processes are oriented to the Federal Government providing this overall leadership and the last few years of "starve the beast" policy making has degraded the Feds as a directing force, with the domination of polarizing ideology just icing on the cake.

State have had cobble together their own ad-hoc response, hobble by not expect this and also by not knowing what legal authority they're acting on.

yes I was also thinking about how hot the containers could get, especially in the upcoming summer months. They could be useful though if it's really possible to just load them on the back of a truck/boat and move them. This way they could be shared between cities/states/countries as the location of the peak moves.

An ICU would already need air conditioning so might be less of a problem, while transportability would help with cases further away from main hospitals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com