Emergency field hospital being built in Central Park for coronavirus patients

An emergency field hospital is being set up in Central Park by Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian humanitarian aid organization, in response to the growing coronavirus pandemic in New York City. 

Volunteers from local churches helped the organization’s church set up a 68-bed respiratory care unit in the park on Saturday, the organization said. 

A disaster assistance response team, including doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, will soon be on the ground as well, according to the organization. 

“People are dying from the coronavirus, hospitals are out of beds, and the medical staff are overwhelmed,” Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse, said in the announcement. “We are deploying our Emergency Field Hospital to New York to help carry this burden.”

Patients will be coming to the field hospital from the Mount Sinai Health System, according to Samaritan’s Purse.

New York has the most number of cases of coronavirus across the U.S. There’s 59,513 cases in the state, including 33,768 cases in New York City, according to the state’s health department data.