Reno hospital has treated more than 250 Covid patients in parking garage as cases surge in Nevada

‘Frontline caregivers are seeing things that they never would have imagined,’ says Renown Health CEO Tony Slonim

A Nevada hospital has treated at least 265 patients in a parking garage in the space of three weeks, amid a rise in hospitalisations in the state due to coronavirus.

The Renown Regional Medical Centre in Reno, Nevada, began treating coronavirus patients in its parking garage three weeks ago, as the facility struggled to find room to house them.

Within the first three days of the ward opening, the hospital had admitted 33 patients, Renown Health told The Independent on 18 November.

The hospital told CBS News on Monday that in the three weeks since it opened, the makeshift ward has treated at least 265 coronavirus patients.

Tony Slonim, the president and CEO of Renown Health, told CBS: “Our frontline caregivers are seeing things that they never would have imagined.”

Jacob Keeperman, an intensive care unit doctor at Renown Health, added: “Nobody who has gone into medicine ever thought they would be providing care in a parking garage.”

And Janet Baum, the field hospital's nursing manager, added that she has not seen anything like the makeshift ward since she started working in health care.

“Never in my wildest nightmares would I ever have thought that we would ever see something that would be killing this many people,” Ms Baum told CBS.

The hospital initially set up the alternative care facility at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March, but was not forced to use it until November.

The temporary medical structure cost $11m (£8.2m) and allows the hospital to accommodate an additional 1,600 beds in a heated atmosphere pressurised for adequate airflow, the Associated Press reported.

The ward was opened as Nevada saw a spike in cases last month. At the time, Mr Slonim told a press conference that “people are being hospitalised and dying at higher rates than before”.

However, the state has seen a dramatic coroanvirus surge over the last few weeks, and on Monday, the Nevada Hospital Association announced that the amount of people hospitalised in the state because of Covid-19 has more than doubled over the last month.

The number of coronavirus patients hospitalised in the state rose by 230 per cent from 6 November to 6 December, as 1,617 people were in hospital in Nevada on Monday, compared to 692 a month earlier.

The association also reported on Monday that 80 per cent of staffed hopsital beds in the state were occupied, while 40 per cent of ventilators were in use.

Nevada’s positivity rate over the past two weeks was also the highest it has been since the start of the pandemic, as 21 per cent of coronavirus tests came back positive over the last 14 days.

Since the start of the pandemic, Nevada has recorded more than 171,000 coronavirus cases and at least 2,326 deaths.

According to Johns Hopkins University, there are now more than 14.9 million people who have tested positive for the coronavirus in the US. The death toll has reached 283,743.