AUTHOR=Pandey Navin , Kaushal Vipin , Puri Goverdhan Dutt , Taneja Sunil , Biswal Manisha , Mahajan Pranay , Guru Rashmi Ranjan , Malhotra Pankaj , Sehgal Inderpaul Singh , Dhooria Sahajal , Muthu Valliappan , Agarwal Ritesh TITLE=Transforming a General Hospital to an Infectious Disease Hospital for COVID-19 Over 2 Weeks JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health VOLUME=8 YEAR=2020 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.00382 DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2020.00382 ISSN=2296-2565 ABSTRACT=

Pandemics like the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 can cause a significant strain on the healthcare system. Healthcare organizations must be ready with their contingency plans for managing many patients with contagious infectious disease. Ideally, every large hospital should have a facility that can function as a high-level isolation unit. An isolation unit ensures that the healthcare staff and the hospital are equipped to deal with infectious disease outbreaks. Unfortunately, such facilities do not exist in several hospitals, especially in resource-limited settings. In such a scenario, healthcare setups need to convert their existing general structure into an infectious disease facility. Herein, we describe our experience in transforming a general hospital into a functional infectious disease isolation unit.