Coronavirus: Emergency hospital to be set up in London’s ExCel centre

An emergency hospital with 4,000 beds being set up at the Excel centre, in London’s Docklands, to treat coronavirus victims will be ready within a week, with other similar facilities being organised urgently throughout the country.

The facility, which has been called NHS Nightingale, is due to take 500 patients when it opens next week, rising to two wards of 2,000 each by the first week of April.

Health secretary Matt Hancock confirmed: “We will, next week, open a new hospital – a temporary hospital – the NHS Nightingale Hospital at the Excel centre in London. The NHS Nightingale Hospital will comprise two wards, each of 2,000 people. With the help of the military and with NHS clinicians, we will make sure that we have the capacity that we need.”

A number of hotels near hospitals are also being considered for treatment of virus victims including, The Independent understands, one near St Thomas’s Hospital in London. Hotels near hospitals are seen, say Whitehall officials, as one of the best places to deal with overspill of patients.

Plans being drawn up will aim to provide emergency facilities for every region of the UK, with personnel from the Ministry of Defence’s Covid Support Group “filling the gap from peacetime capability to virtually a wartime one”.

The mission is being run from the Headquarters Standing Joint Command in Aldershot, which coordinates resilience missions for the state. Planners have been studying the situation in the worst affected countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, as well as other states internationally to find the “lessons learned” that could inform the strategy to be used in Britain.

The emergency hospitals will be staffed by NHS personnel, with the armed forces helping with supplies and logistical organisation, although this may change in the future of the need arises.

Reservists have been called up, although those already working in hospitals will continue to do so. Medics doing regular service may be involved and specialists in treating traumas, the most common factor in battlefields, are receiving training to deal with Covid-19.

Almost every government department, it is believed, has asked for help from the military under the terms of Military Aid to Civil Authorities, which allows the armed forces to be deployed to help civil powers in emergencies. Although they will be available to help the police if there is looting and to guard quarantine zones if these are established, defence officials say they do not foresee any public order role at present.

More than 2,000 service personnel are currently on 24 hours notice to deploy and 1,500 are on 48 hours’ notice. Up to 700 members of the forces have been used so far to deliver supplies and around 150 drivers are being trained to drive lorries to deliver oxygen to hospitals.

Armed forces personnel are going through the same checking system as the rest of the population, with people showing symptoms being tested.

Senior officers say that they know that contraction of Covid-19 cannot be avoided, but the numbers may remain low because the majority of those deployed are relatively young and fit.