Czech hospital bed maker rushes to meet government order

SLANY, Czech Republic (AP) — Some orders are impossible for manufacturers to turn down. A Czech maker of hospital beds received one this month.

Hours before the Czech government announced that the armed forces would be building a field hospital for 500 COVID-19 patients at Prague’s exhibition ground, Prime Minister Andrej Babis approached the Linet company with a request to deliver the hospital beds for the facility, and for elsewhere.

“It’s a very special situation for us,” Linet executive director Tomas Kolar told The Associated Press on Monday.

Hectic negotiations between the company and the government are expected to result in the signing of a deal shortly for a total of 1,620 hospital beds, of which 420 are for intensive care units.

Kolar said such an order would normally take 12-18 months to fulfil. In this case, “it would be one week between the prime minister’s call and the first delivery.”

In this case, time matters.

The local health system has been under pressure and hospitals are filling up with patients. As the number of people currently with the virus surpassed 100,000 in the Czech Republic, over 3,500 of them need hospitalization and almost 600 of those are in intensive care, according to government figures released on Monday.

The number of new cases has tripled in the past two weeks, from a seven-day rolling daily average of 23.81 per 100,000 people on Oct. 4 to 75.74 on Sunday.

The Health Ministry predicted the system could reach its capacity around the end of October.

“The state needs the hospital right now, not sometime in December,” Kolar said.

Under normal circumstances, such an order would not be a problem for a firm that is expected to make 120,000 beds this year, 10,000 more than in 2019 and is considered the top European...