Army Completes Temporary Hospital in Washington Convention Center
May 12, 2020 (EIRNS)—The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers unveiled its latest alternate care facility in the nation’s capital yesterday, a 430-bed hospital build inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The facility is intended to provide additional bed capacity in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic which has sickened 6,400 people in Washington, D.C. and taken the lives of 320. “I can’t think of a more noble calling than to be able to build up a facility like this to help keep people alive,” Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the Commander of the Corps, said at a press briefing, reported the Army News Service. Semonite stressed that the new facility was built using lessons the Corps has learned over the past two months building such facilities in New York and several other cities across the country.
“I’ve been through an awful lot of these facilities, but this one is probably the best one we’ve ever built,” Semonite said, “because it’s the one that is the most current and we rolled all of those other capabilities in.”
“We can see the innovations of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers here and how they’re brought to bear in response to this pandemic,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said at the briefing. “We consider this site our insurance policy. We hope that we will never have to use it, but it is here and staffed for when or if we do.”
