NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - New York City officials have started lodging health-care workers with coronavirus symptoms in repurposed hotels, providing a template for cities across the US looking for ways to keep hospital workers from infecting more people as they battle the pandemic.

The city is putting health-care workers in hundreds of hotel rooms it has secured across the five boroughs and wants to secure thousands more rooms, said Heather Roiter, the head of hazard mitigation in the city's Office of Emergency Management.

Workers with Covid-19 symptoms can quarantine in the rooms, she said, with separate spaces for asymptomatic health-care workers who want to guard against passing infections to family members.

Other cities could adopt similar plans after a big hotel operator on Monday (March 30) offered up tens of thousands of rooms across the US. Aimbridge Hospitality, the largest operator of Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt hotels, announced a deal with Trestle Health and Housing to make more than 700 US hotels with 103,000 rooms available as surge capacity for hospitals and municipalities.

It's an attempt to bridge the gap in American hospital capacity during an unprecedented crisis. It's also an effort to try to generate even meagre business as the hospitality industry has been battered by the virus' spread. With few Americans travelling and most confining themselves to their homes, hoteliers are realising that their properties' highest and best use may be as makeshift hospitals or as a place to crash for hospital staff who don't want to risk bringing the virus home.

Roiter of New York City's emergency management office said the city would foot the room bills, expecting reimbursement later from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"For us what's really important is that the hotel is willing to take people who are exposed to Covid-19 and may be symptomatic. And because of the nature of being in isolation, we'll have to isolate them in a room, and we must have a way to provide feeding and laundry services," she said.

The city will provide some on-site health care for the workers but isn't planning on using hotels as hospital space, according to Avery Cohen, a spokesman for the mayor's office.

Trestle, the consulting firm that's partnering with Aimbridge on rooms across the US, saw a need to move quickly to address the expanding health crisis, according to founder Bill Mulcahy. When the coronavirus hit, Trestle was crafting arrangements with hotels in Los Angeles to house homeless people, he said. "You didn't have to be a genius to figure out how quickly this was moving and how fast you'd overwhelm the hospitals," said Mulcahy.

Trestle and Aimbridge pre-published room and meal rates to ward off any concern of price gouging, from US$69 (S$98) a night for a room at the Doubletree in Beaverton, Oregon, to US$106 a night for the Hilton in New York's Chelsea neighbourhood. Governments or hospitals will prepay for an entire hotel for 60 days, and Mulcahy says the hotels can turn them over in fewer than two weeks.

The urgent need to house more patients and health-care workers aligns with hotels' empty-room woes. Shares of hoteliers have been hit especially hard by the coronavirus bear market, in many cases doubling the 19 per cent year-to-date losses in the S&P 500 index. Shares in Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc have fallen 38 per cent during that period, while shares of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts Inc have collapsed 49 per cent.

Occupancies have plummeted to record lows, with New York and San Francisco hotels registering rates below 17 per cent, according to lodging data firm STR. The industry could shed 1 million jobs, according to one trade group estimate, and Marriott International Inc, Hyatt Hotels Corp and others have furloughed thousands of corporate employees.

On Saturday, Apollo Global Management-owned Diamond Resorts, which sells time shares, announced that it would be allowing medical staff and first responders access to free suites. Last week, the owner of the Four Seasons on 57th Street in Manhattan said he would give doctors and nurses free housing at the luxury hotel, where rooms typically go for as much as US$6,500 a night.

"Many of those working in New York City have to travel long distances to and from their homes after putting in 18-hour days," said Ty Warner, the founder and chairman of Ty Warner Hotels and Resorts, which owns the property. "They need a place close to work where they can rest and regenerate."

The Four Seasons is donating its rooms as part of a state programme that's attracted more than 70,000 retiree and out-of-state medical workers, said Dani Lever, spokeswoman for Governor Andrew Cuomo. Roiter declined to identify hotels in the city programme that are lodging health-care workers, citing confidentiality issues.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio made hotels an early plank of his Covid-19 response plan, saying in a March 17 release that the city had identified 250 rooms in five small hotels. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo named five other hotels, including the St. Regis New York and the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn, as potential sites for non-critical care or medical personnel.

The state wants to work with owners of larger properties, said Vijay Dardapani, chief executive officer of the Hotel Association of New York City. The trade group gave government officials a list of 15 hotels, each with roughly 500 rooms or more, and expects that as many as 10,000 rooms could be adopted for a variety of uses.

The owner of one large New York hotel said last week that, based on his conversations with Cuomo's office, hotels are not ideally suited for use as intensive care units but could work for patients with less acute conditions. The state is assessing virtually every hotel in Manhattan, said the owner, who asked not to be identified because the matter was private.

Northwell Health, the largest healthcare provider in the state, has been crafting arrangements with hotels for staff who don't want to return home, Chief Medical Officer David Battinelli said in a March 18 interview.

In the Aimbridge partnership, a two-month takeover of the 280-room Hilton in Chelsea could be had for less than US$1.8 million, based on the published room rate of US$106. The hotel advertised rooms at an average rate of US$169 a night during the week ending Feb 1, before the coronavirus curtailed US travel, according to data compiled by Hotel Compete.