US charity sets up field hospital in New York's Central Park for Covid-19 patients
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Staff and volunteers from Samaritan's Purse, a US-based Christian global relief agency, erecting tents for a makeshift hospital in Central Park in New York on Sunday. The site, located right across from one of the facilities in the Mount Sinai hospital group, will have the equipment and personnel necessary to handle Covid-19 patients.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
NEW YORK • In New York's Central Park on Sunday, a field hospital was going up.
Dozens of people worked in a drizzle to erect the facility for an expected influx of Covid-19 patients at the epicentre of the United States' coronavirus epidemic.
Samaritan's Purse, a US-based Christian global relief agency, is setting up the hospital on the park's East Meadow lawn, where workers in face masks unloaded a white tarpaulin and other equipment on the grass. The site is right across from one of the facilities in the Mount Sinai hospital group.
"There are lots of cases here in New York and a lot of people who need help," said Dr Elliott Tenpenny, team leader for the Samaritan's Purse Covid-19 Response Team. "The hospitals all over the city are filling up and they need as much help as they can get. That's why we're here."
He said the charity was working with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Mount Sinai, with the aim of receiving patients within two days.
Unlike other temporary facilities going up in the New York region, this site will have the equipment and personnel necessary to handle Covid-19 patients. Dr Tenpenny called it a "respiratory-focused field hospital", which will have capacity for 68 patients and the doctors and nurses to treat them.
Samaritan's Purse has set up a similar temporary hospital in Cremona, Italy, the country with the highest Covid-19 death toll.
On Sunday, Mr Cuomo said New York state had more than 59,500 cases and 965 deaths, making it by far the hardest-hit area in the US. Those figures account for over 40 per cent of the country's cases and deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
New York medical staff are struggling with long hours and a dire need for hospital-grade masks and other protective gear.
Dr Tenpenny said that although his organisation is faith-based, "we provide care to anybody at any time without regard to who they are, just if they have need".
The charity has been helping the world's victims of war, poverty, natural disasters and other crises since 1970. "The US is in massive need right now and so here we are setting up to help our own country," said Dr Tenpenny.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
