Construction workers build the temporary Pandemic Response Unit at Joseph Brant Hospital in Burlington, Ont., on March 31, 2020.Canada’s three largest provinces have begun setting up temporary makeshift hospitals to expand their number of available beds in anticipation of an influx of patients with COVID-19.
Three provinces rolled out plans this week to transform other sites into makeshift hospitals. In British Columbia, Vancouver’s waterfront Convention Centre will be equipped to house 270 patients. In Quebec, the government has earmarked 4,000 hotel rooms that could be pressed into service under its public health emergency laws. And in Ontario, the government is giving hospitals the go-ahead to temporarily lease space in other buildings, including hotels and retirement homes.
“We are doing everything we can to care for the people of Burlington to prepare for these unprecedented times,” Eric Vandewall, the hospital’s chief executive officer, said in a news release on Monday. Quebec has identified an additional 1,500 beds that can be added outside hospitals, in other health care institutions and the recently decommissioned Hôtel-Dieu hospital. That hospital was already partly reopened to create a diagnostic clinic for new cases.The local health authority in Laval, a suburb north of Montreal, has rented an entire Quality Inn to house up to 133 palliative care patients from the Cité-de-la-Santé hospital to make room for incoming COVID-19 patients.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was asked Tuesday about two First Nations in Manitoba that have requested Ottawa’s help to set up military hospitals in remote communities with limited access to health care. Unlike tents that have popped up in field hospitals in New York City and elsewhere, the semi-permanent structures BLT assembles are typically used for disaster-recovery operations and can withstand winter weather conditions and hurricane-force winds.