AP PHOTOS: A look inside a modern COVID-19 'field hospital'
CRANSTON, R.I. (AP) — Nicholas DiPompo was finally going home.
Clutching his cane, the 78-year-old former property manager, who had spent weeks battling COVID-19 in a Rhode Island field hospital, eased into a wheelchair and hollered across the hall.
“You got my number,” DiPompo shouted to fellow patient Art Singleton, whom he’d grown close to after three weeks together. “Give me a call when you get out.” He said they’d go to his favorite restaurant for baked stuffed lobster.
Singleton, 56, sat in his wheelchair and watched as a nurse pushed his friend down the makeshift hallway. Another nurse pulled DiPompo’s oxygen tank behind him, past a long row of blue curtains, a bed behind each one.
“We were at the bottom,” DiPompo said of his friendship with Singleton, a pizzeria employee who had lost part of a leg to diabetes. “He had no feet, I had heart disease.”
Then DiPompo left, wheeled out of a field hospital built in an old Citizens Bank call center, in a two-story office building on a busy commercial street. The non-profit Care New England health network opened the Kent Field Hospital on Nov. 30, just before Rhode Island’s infection rate became the highest in the world. Kent Hospital was using all its beds for its sickest COVID-19 patients, and needed somewhere for the overflow. Now, other hospitals also occasionally send patients to the field hospital.
Rhode Island’s infection rate has come down since then, and many of the field hospital’s 335 beds are now empty. On quiet days, the medical staff wishes they could do more.
Only stable, non-intubated COVID-19 patients are transferred a few miles to the field hospital, and only if they consent. Some refuse. The idea of a field hospital can conjure up images of giant tents in a war zone,...
