Use Cruise Ships as Added Non-Coronavirus Hospitals For Italy and Elsewhere

During WW2, Four Kaiser Shipyards built 747 fourteen thousand ton Liberty ships. One ship was completed one in five days.

In February, China built a new hospital in ten days. The 645,000-square-foot makeshift medical facility was two floors and has 1,000 beds, several isolation wards, and 30 intensive care units.

The USA is currently converting recovery rooms to intensive care units.

The US has two major hospital ships. They are being used to provide non-coronavirus care for New York and for Los Angeles.

Today, Carnival Cruise line offered its ships as hospitals.

The quickest way to make more hospital ships would be to convert existing large ships. Cruise ships are not being used for commercial purposes at this time and will not be used for months. The ships have electricity and beds. They could get other medical equipment placed quickly.

It would enable faster help for areas that have had medical capacity overrun. This would be in Italy and could soon be in New York.

Cruise ships are not being used and are not good for preventing the spread of disease. However, they could be used to hold and treat non-coronavirus patients. We could avoid using them for maximum density. They could hold patients and doctors. Mainly the ocean view or rooms with balconies could be used. Perhaps only half or 25% of the capacity could be used.

SOURCES- Carnival Cruises, Wikipedia
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

17 thoughts on “Use Cruise Ships as Added Non-Coronavirus Hospitals For Italy and Elsewhere”

  1. Cruise ships are floating petri dishes.
    There is no way to keep staff safe if there are hundreds of infected person on board

  2. They should be allowed to go about their everyday lives. Providing they ring a bell continuously and yell “unclean! unclean!” to warn other people.
    There should be an ap for that.

  3. Building generic hospital ships to offload patients from fixed land hospitals, and have land hospitals have the equipment to turn the whole place into isolation wards might be a better pattern for coastal cities. The ships also double as conventional disaster response ships for natural disasters (southeastern US gets hit with hurricanes enough to justify having more than one hospital ship permanently based around there). Leave the specialization to land facilities. Doesn’t do anything for flyover states though, except maybe those along the missippi river if you can create a barge equivalent to a hospital ship…

    Or refurbish all those old state hospitals/sanitariums/leper colonies built in rural areas, but that has other drawbacks including ongoing maintenance costs (why they were abandoned in the first place). They aren’t suitable for resort conversions due to location, if you wanted them to function as dual use facilities to pay their own way.

    Or we can always do the oft maligned FEMA tent cities on unoccupied military base land, though that would instantly have connotations with FEMA death camps…

  4. Yes, but just think about what would happen if you got just a single case of SARS-CoV-2 abroad. Those ships seem to be designed to spread disease and not contain it.

    I’m think they would make really great artificial reefs.

  5. US military hospital ships apparently are converted oil tanker designs? Any candidate oil tankers at ship breakers that could be salvaged and converted on short notice by teh US Army Corps of Engineers? Maybe a containerized hospital system that could be slotted into a reefer ship (which usually have more extensive power for refrigeration?). Maybe the banana ships, which have both power and nitrogen gas systems plumbed?

  6. True. A ship designed from the start as an isolation ship would be OK I guess.

    Then we have to ask whether that shouldn’t be the required standard for cruise ships anyway.

    But the current designs are known to be disease pits at the best of times.

  7. Maybe UNited states should set aside Federal funds to build a network of pandemic hospital in the country ..so that they are prepared for the next time around when the Chinese screwup Up the word with another pandemic virus… Just need to maintain some extra large Open space building Ext to hospitals with cubical partitioned rooms and thousands of beds…

  8. looks like nyc is still on exponential virus growth dispite lockdown….

    personally, I feel that shutdown order for United States and Europe doesn’t slow the virus as much as in China… there’s Something to be said for Being a total Chinese control freak commie party goverment… they really can shutdown the spread Of a virus like an iron fist… I think American and Europeans don’t have enough control to get a 100% shutdown of the virus.. best they can do is slow it down by half… Chinese excel at being draconian

  9. I think there’s a need for isolation of corona virus positive patients who don’t require hospitalization. This is something thatChina did that serves a very useful function but doesn’t require as much medical staff. Cruise ships would be useful for this.

  10. Here in Brazil some cruise ships were already converted in hospitals for Covid19 cases. As those happened in some northeastern cities (like Recife (Reef)), which have seen few cases so far, the demand is still low.

    Majority of cases SEEM to be concentrated in São Paulo and Rio.

    My 250 thousand city near Porto Alegre (Neu Hamburg) has zero cases so far. Hmmm… very weird. The mayor, Fatima Daudt, is probably just failing in direct the population to the correct places to testing.

  11. Inevitably cases of COVID-19 would show up on board, and given their history that might tend to cause panic among patients.

    Better than being in a hospital you know is over-run with COVID-19 cases, I suppose.

Comments are closed.