Quote:
Originally Posted by SFUVancouver
It's just the downstairs exhibition hall that's being converted to a hospital. The majority of the space in the convention centre is in ballrooms, breakout rooms, and those massive corridors, foyers, and anterooms. I could absolutely see the East Convention Centre being utilized as well. Furthermore, hospitals have a lot fewer beds than one might expect. VGH is physically massive, one of the largest in the country, but it still only has on the order of a thousand beds of all types.
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To be clear, while the hospital setup is being worked on now, this is a long way from being needed in the immediate future. To quote Health Minister Adrian Dix "There are 4,233 empty hospital beds. So this is creating even more capacity than that, and to do that you have to prepare in advance. You can't decide two days from now you need a temporary hospital and put that together," [
source].
If there was a huge spike in cases, the Province now have additional facilities available here, and in Royal Columbian, which would be used for recovering non-Covid patients, away from the main areas of the hospitals that would be dealing with Covid patients. They could add even more capacity, but in BC the authorities - and the public response - seem to be doing pretty well so far at keeping new transmissions and the numbers of new cases requiring hospital care down.