MIAMI — Coronavirus patients could soon isolate in style: Taxpayer-subsidized rooms at Florida hotels, including the luxurious Fontainebleau Miami Beach.
Under a plan that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has floated to federal planning agencies, the state is prepared to use hotels as quarantine or rehabilitation sites to break the chain of viral transmission.
With hotels empty and desperate for money, and public health officials demanding isolation centers, the state sees an elegant solution.
“We have already been in contact with major hotel groups as well as local hotels, and we’re being contacted by major hotel chains offering to house first responders and potentially to be isolation centers — that’s including big hotels like the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach,” said Jared Moskowitz, Florida’s director of emergency management.
The idea is in its early stages as Florida war games a frightening scenario — a contagion that drags into hurricane season, Moskowitz said. The already complex stay-at-home response to the coronavirus becomes orders of magnitude more difficult if people need to flee a storm.
Hurricane season begins June 1 and lasts until Nov. 30.
Moskowitz said the hotel proposal was raised this weekend during a meeting with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as it eyed using the Miami Beach Convention Center as a field hospital. The state has presented the plan to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. If it's approved, the federal government would pay the state to manage the hotels.
Dr. Aileen Marty, a Florida International University pandemic and infectious disease expert, said President Donald Trump — himself a hotel entrepreneur — needs to use his executive authority to order hotels to open their doors to patients.
“Whether they want to or not, we need to force hotels to function as isolation wards for individuals, and these would be mild to moderate cases,” Marty said, noting that the new coronavirus stimulus law loosened federal purse strings.
“We can do this,” she said. “We can reimburse the hotels. We’ve got $2 trillion. It’s not like these hotels are going to lose any money; they’re not being used because people aren’t going on vacation. And we can clean it up afterward.”
Marty said the hotel rooms probably couldn’t be used for intensive care units because they require rooms with specialized pressure settings.
Cruise ships, likewise, couldn’t be used for coronavirus patients because many don’t have rooms with individual ventilation systems.
Florida Chamber of Commerce President Mark Wilson said business groups and state officials have been meeting to figure out how to handle the twin problems of a hurricane in a time of coronavirus.
“The advantage is we’ve been through hurricanes before in this state. So we know how to work in a crisis and convert schools into shelters,” Wilson said. “So the use of hotels and the use of cruise ships and the use of schools — if done right — makes an awful lot of sense.”