Milan Wants To Build an Emergency Hospital in Six Days

March 13, 2020 (EIRNS)—The Lombardy regional administration wants to build an emergency hospital which will have capacity for 500 intensive care beds plus 200 acute care beds. The hospital should be built on the premises of the Milan Trade Fair, whose management will pay part of the costs.

The structure will have special containers with beds and the necessary equipment. The hospital will need 500 medical doctors and 1,200 nurses, who are being recruited also from among pre-licensed personnel.

Initially, it was announced that the hospital will be built in six days, but today the administration backtracked. It looks like the Civil Protection Department had initially promised to provide the equipment, but now they say that they don’t have enough. A first stock of ventilators sold by China arrived yesterday with the task force of medical doctors and nurses from Shanghai, led by Chinese Red Cross Vice President Yang Huichuan and by senior respiratory care physician Liang Zongan from West China Hospital in Sichuan, but the ventilators were given to the Red Cross. Lombardy Regional President Attilio Fontana said they will try to buy the equipment on the international market and if the equipment is not found, the hospital will not be built.

The new hospital is crucial, among other facilities, to sufficiently expand intensive care beds in order to manage the peak of contagion which should be reached in about four weeks.