The city will be teaming up with the state and the feds to rent Big Apple hotels and convert them into temporary hospitals to help ease burden on other facilities dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, Mayor de Blasio said Monday.
De Blasio told NY1 that these three levels of government would create “thousands” of non-ICU hospitals rooms by, “in some cases, leasing entire hotels” that are “ideally” near existing hospitals.
“We can take a hotel floor plan – I talked this through right here at City Hall with the Army Corps of Engineers leadership on Friday night — and they showed me the floor plans of how you turn a hotel into an instant hospital,” de Blasio said.
“You create a nurse’s station around where the elevators are. I mean they have really simple things they do to flip a switch basically and turn a hotel into a hospital. And we’re going to be doing that to the tune of thousands and thousands of rooms.”
The mayor did not say how much the plan will cost or when it would be completed.