200-bed surge hospital nears opening in Atlanta exhibit hall
ATLANTA — With Georgia officials still believing the state’s hospitalization peak from COVID-19 is in the future, they’re close to opening a 200-bed facility in a downtown Atlanta convention center.
Crews have built rows of gleaming white cubicles, each 10 feet square, atop a bright white plastic floor in an exhibition hall at the sprawling Georgia World Congress Center. The bare rooms — most only have a hospital bed — are meant to host patients sick with coronavirus but who don’t need intensive care.
The state is spending $21.5 million on the project, including more than $6 million just to build the facility, which could be scaled up to 400 beds. It’s meant to provide a margin of safety for Georgia’s hospitals as a predicted peak in cases and hospitalizations approaches at the start of May amid the global virus outbreak.
“If you have something that happens when we do get to the peak time, and our hospital bed capacity is nip and tuck, we’ll be glad we had a facility like this,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp told reporters after his tour.
The hospital is supposed to open this weekend after final inspections, with crews having completed construction ahead of schedule.
“Well, it’s definitely sobering to have to do something like this in the first place,” Kemp said. “But it’s also makes me feel good at how quickly something like this came together.” For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough that clear up within weeks. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness, including lifethreatening pneumonia.
As of Wednesday, the Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency reported that 2,071 of the state’s 2,950 critical care hospital beds were in use, as well as 8,900 of the state’s 14,400 general hospital beds. Kemp said the Atlanta facility would be for patients from all over Georgia and touted other efforts to increase hospital capacity, including modular pods being deployed in Rome, Albany, Gainesville and Macon.