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> Literally building a brand new hospital. We built multiple temporary hospitals in the UK too. And albeit not so widely reported, temporary morgues. To be h

• rataata_jr 5y ago
  Temporary hospitals were a thing here in India as well. Marriage halls, schools and unis were repurposed to have lots of beds for covid patients.
• Retric 5y ago
  Yes, the important bit was they where the canary in the coal mine for the pandemic. However, it’s really difficult to be proactive here as avoiding an issues means people assume it isn’t a problem. Shutdowns likely saved millions of lives in America but as people are only aware of the downsides they see not the horrors that where avoided.
• pjc50 5y ago
  The reporting on this has been very weird. UK news had massive coverage of deaths in Italy, then when it started hitting the UK hard, it went invisible. I'm not sure the UK emergency Nightingale hospitals were actually _used_, since (obviously) you can repurpose a building but you can't just find a few thousand healthcare staff at short notice. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56327214
  • makomk 5y ago
    I don't think the Nightingales were used much, but that was mostly because the existing hospitals managed to free up more beds than originally anticipated and all the available staff ended up there. Naturally, the government got endless flack for this, as is often the case when a government puts measures into place for a contingency that doesn't come to pass. (Also, relying on freeing up beds may not have been a good decision in hindsight - one of the ways this was achieved was by aggressively kicking people with potential hospital-acquired Covid infections out into care homes full of people at high risk of dying if they caught Covid, with ugly consequences.)
    • tailspin2019 5y ago
      > Naturally, the government got endless flack for this, as is often the case when a government puts measures into place for a contingency that doesn't come to pass. I’m not one to show much support for the current government but the negative (media) reaction to these hospitals not actually being needed was pretty short sighted. We should be thankful that the hospitals were there and even more thankful that they weren’t needed. There were more obvious things for which to hold the government to account.
• lelandfe 5y ago
  Yeah, NYC saw "temporary morgues" as well, in the form of refrigerated shipping containers. One of the more resonant memories of the pandemic from last year to me.
  • steve_adams_86 5y ago
    This happened during the 1918 influenza pandemic as well. Rather, the overflow of casualties happened - not refrigerated shipping containers. Samples of sick people were recovered for researching that strain of influenza by locating large graves which had been created where it remained cold enough to preserve the bodies. Until I'd heard that and lived through last year, the gravity of it all totally eluded me. It takes a lot before people start burying the dead in trenches; it's perhaps second to the worst case in which we can't even manage that. A scenario common to war but nothing else I can think of. I've been so isolated from these kinds of circumstances for all of the pandemic, but I try to remind myself that it's exactly why lock downs and masks and all the hassle are actually completely reasonable. The alternative is incredibly dark, evidently.