A month ago, local health care leaders were preparing for the worst.
With some projections indicating a COVID-19 surge would hit Tennessee around mid-April, the state was racing forward in a furious effort with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to re-fashion and equip arenas and convention centers with medical equipment and 7,000 overflow hospital beds.
A chief concern was having enough ventilators to sustain patients in respiratory failure, a mark of severe infection in the coronavirus global pandemic.
In Chattanooga, the plan was to outfit a 400,000-square-foot building on the Alstom property with enough staff and beds to treat around 1,500 patients. Multiple loads of personal protective equipment from the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency were delivered and distributed to acute care hospitals across the region to alleviate supply shortages.
Scarce data due to a limited amount of COVID-19 testing left local decision makers largely in the dark. Chattanooga’s peak in cases was expected to come a couple of weeks behind the state’s based on what was happening in Nashville and Memphis – which saw cases sooner and were where most of Tennessee’s data was coming from.