Hotels, Fashion Owners Considering Repurposing To Help Coronavirus Efforts

Businesses that are in one lane, like hospitality and fashion, could be temporarily pivoting to help in the ongoing coronavirus crisis.

For example, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that New York City is considering turning hotels into temporary hospitals for patients that don’t have COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in an effort to have available hospital beds for the afflicted.

New York’s emergency management commissioner, Deanne Criswell, said it could become a vital necessity, as the hotels could be available for “those non-COVID patients who are really minor but need care.”

Right now, the city is using some hotels for quarantine, and they could also be used to give healthcare workers a place to stay, especially since many hotels in the city are empty right now.

The city has 1,339 cases of the virus as of Wednesday (March 18), and there have been 10 deaths so far.

Officials in the city also want to turn the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan into a large hospital, with the help of federal medical stations.

As demand grows, Mayor Bill de Blasio has asked that retired medical professionals come back to work, and he is looking into whether there is a way to credential medical students as well. They would be used to handle non coronavirus patients.

“This will be a race against time to create these facilities to get them up and running, to find the personnel and the equipment we need,” de Blasio said. “We have no choice but to expand rapidly and be ready for anything.”

In other news, Inditex, which owns fashion company Zara, has said that it could soon be making hospital scrubs to help healthcare workers in Spain, according to a report by Reuters.

The company said that the pandemic has shut down almost half of its stores, but that it was going to make its logistics and supplier network available to Spain to “meet Spain’s emergency needs of both medical and textile materials.”

The company said it has donated 10,000 masks and that 300,000 are on the way.