Since January 2020, many cases of coronavirus disease 2019 have been
confirmed in China. Local officials had reported 47,647 new cases of
COVID-19 as of 24:00 on 21/2/2020, of which 10,892 were severe cases
(National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China, 2020).
The mortality rate of critically ill patients reached over 50% (World
Health Organization, 2020a). To improve the treatment capacity for
critically ill patients and reduce mortality, one site at our hospital
was opened to admit patients with COVID-19. The original intensive care
unit at this site only had 20 beds. However, due to the fact that
critically ill patients far outnumbered existing beds, and the fact that
the use of the 10,000-level laminar flow system in the existing ICU was
not conducive to protecting medical staff, decision was made to convert
two general wards into two temporary ICUs, adding 72 beds for the
critical ill. To date, the two temporary ICUs run well. The experience
of assembling ICUs is described as follows.