Harrogate’s Nightingale Hospital is a turning point in virus war – David Behrens

In 1982, they staged the Eurovision Song Contest in Harrogate Convention Centre. This year, Eurovision is cancelled and the centre is being filled with emergency beds by the hundred. That’s a sad snapshot of the world right now.
Newly installed signage for the field hospital to be known as the NHS Nightingale Hospital being created at the ExCeL London exhibition centre in London (Getty Images)Newly installed signage for the field hospital to be known as the NHS Nightingale Hospital being created at the ExCeL London exhibition centre in London (Getty Images)
Newly installed signage for the field hospital to be known as the NHS Nightingale Hospital being created at the ExCeL London exhibition centre in London (Getty Images)

Probably not since the musicians left the stage has there been such a huge construction job there.

The town is filled with contractors charged with turning the centre’s 150,000 sq ft into a field hospital no different in principle to the one in the Crimea where Florence Nightingale shone her lamp. It is no coincidence the unit bears her name.

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The speed at which the operation has been scrambled helps to restore one’s faith in our ability to move mountains when really necessary and we can take some comfort from the knowledge that if the expected influx of casualties does come, we will be better prepared for it. Harrogate’s Nightingale Hospital is one of five. The largest, in east London’s Excel Conference Centre, is capable of accommodating 4,000 beds, which makes it currently the largest critical-care facility in the world.

Contractors working at the Harrogate Convention Centre being turned into a hospital for Coronavirus patients.Contractors working at the Harrogate Convention Centre being turned into a hospital for Coronavirus patients.
Contractors working at the Harrogate Convention Centre being turned into a hospital for Coronavirus patients.

Yet it took only a fortnight to put up. One wonders why regular hospitals take so long and cost so much more. It has taken a war to make us efficient. The involvement of the Ministry of Defence is what seems to have made the difference.

It is used to wars, of course, but they are usually far enough away for the rest of us to choose not to notice.

Yet the Nightingale hospitals don’t look like military facilities. With temporary, windowed partitions separating the cubicles, they seem more like vast call centres, with beds where the swivel chairs should be.

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Many civilian wards I’ve visited over the years have not been this streamlined.

All the same, one worries for the safety of the staff and volunteers who will run them. This is, by necessity, the very opposite of social distancing.

The temporary hospitals are not a cause for celebration, of course. Every admission will be a tragedy for someone and the sooner these convention centres can go back to hosting concerts and trade fairs and whatever else they do, the better.

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Most of us will thankfully not see the inside of one. We will instead endure a further period of house arrest with only daytime TV for companionship. Few things are more dispiriting than that – and I speak as someone who used to produce some of it.

We are now nearly two-thirds of the way through the three-week lockdown imposed by the Prime Minister, but with so few testing kits available, it would take a brave punter to bet against an extension. We have on the whole adjusted with remarkable compliance to the emergency conditions. Indeed we may not have been this united since the days when our national heroes were the “boys and girls in khaki and two shades of blue”, as the Home Service used to put it, not the medics of the NHS.

But it is fear that binds us and we won’t stay frightened forever.

Already, some have broken ranks – and from surprising quarters. Lord Sumption is not a fanatical third columnist but a liberal barrister Alastair Campbell, former aide to Tony Blair, described as having “a brain the size of a planet”.

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Sumption broke cover this week to tell Radio 4, the modern-day Home Service, that in surrendering our civil liberties as readily as we have Britain had taken on the appearance of a police state. Derbyshire Police overstepped the mark, he said, by trying to shame people who had used their right to take exercise in the Peak District. It then emerged that in Humberside police had set up a “portal” for citizens to inform on neighbours they suspected of having broken social-distancing rules.

The problem, Sumption agreed, was that little scrutiny of the emergency measures was taking place and, while no one doubted they were well intentioned, it did not necessarily mean they were wise. The absence of counter-argument made it impossible to judge.

“We all have critical faculties and it’s rather important, in a moment of national panic, that we should maintain them,” he concluded.

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The Nightingale hospitals, it seems to me, are a turning point in the war on Covid-19, the first tangible sign we are getting on top of it. Let us hope more signs soon follow.

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