Two Areas and One Passage: A Simplified Protocol for the Transformation of General Hospitals to Infectious Disease Hospitals Upon the Pandemic Outbreak
Abstract Infectious disease hospitals and wards fell far short of demand after the COVID-19 pandemic outbroke. Consequently, it was of urgent importance to transform existing general wards into temporary infectious disease wards for COVID-19 patients. However, due to the limitations of the original structure of public hospitals, general wards could not meet the structural criteria requiring “three areas, two passages, and two hallways” for receiving infectious disease patients. In this article, we present a “Two Areas and One Passage” reconstruction and working protocol, which has been proved to be safe and easy to achieve by medical staff during the epidemic of COVID-19 in 2020. This protocol tremendously helps to save workforce and personal protective equipment compared with standard transformation protocol and thus might be used as an exemplary protocol for the transformation of general hospitals to infectious disease hospitals upon pandemic outbreak. Besides, it also provide a new scope for us to transform the general hospital to military infectious disease hospital if there occur abundant infectious disease suffers in the battlefield.