Just days after a newly-erected field hospital in Seattle was closed up and shipped out without ever having treated a single patient, a similar field hospital in Michigan has been scaled back from its original 1,000 beds to just 250.
According to this, the temporary hospital set up in Novi, a city 25 or so miles from Detroit, was originally supposed to include 1,100 beds to help relieve local hospitals struggling under a predicted influx of COVID-19 patients. But now, that number has been slashed by more than 75 percent, as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said they’re adjusting their plans because the virus projections are “changing very quickly.”
"Originally we were looking at up to 1,100 (beds),” a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' spokesperson said. “But things are changing very quickly."
“It's basically a scaled down version of what we did at TCF," he added. "We're just looking at 250 here at the direction of the state. As things have been changing, our mission currently is 250."
The field hospital was still have the capacity to hold up to 1,100 beds, if needed.
The University of Michigan has also paused their plan to build a 500-bed field facility, as Michigan officials said the curve is “flattening” in the state and that local hospitals are able to handle the number of patients.
"It appears from current COVID-19 cases and modeling that the curve is significantly flattening," Michigan Medicine spokeswoman Mary Masson told the Detroit Free Press.
Though the states coronavirus numbers haven't spiked to the extent that health officials originally feared, even to the point of not needing field hospitals, Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has expanded the state's COVID-19 shutdown regulations to include banning the sale of "non-essential" items -- including clothing and car seats -- in retail stores, outlawing boating, and banning residents from traveling to their own vacation homes. Nearly 24,000 people in Michigan have tested positive for the coronavirus and roughly 1,400 have died as of Sunday.