The container hospital that rose overnight in Italy, and the Vulcan Mountain in China

To help tackle the COVID-19 outbreak, a new program is quietly being born. One called CURA (Connected Unit for Respiratory Diseases) proposes to turn shipping containers into drop-in intensive care units. This is also CURA's first building and is currently under construction in the Italian city of Milan. According to the team behind projects including carlo ratti, the units can be installed as fast as a hospital tent, but can be as safe as an isolation ward thanks to biological isolation with negative pressure.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, an international task force of designers, engineers, medical experts, and military experts came together to work on CURA, an open-source project aimed at building intensive care units (ICUs). The plan uses redesigned shipping containers to create pluggable biocontainment pods that can be rapidly deployed in cities around the world, quickly responding to shortages of hospital ICU space.

CURA is a compact ICU for patients with respiratory infections, packed in a 20ft intermodal container with biological containers (due to negative pressure). Each unit works autonomously and can be shipped anywhere. Individual pods are connected by inflatable structures to create multiple modular configurations (from 4 beds to over 40 beds) that can be deployed in a matter of hours. Some pods can be placed near hospitals (such as parking lots) to expand ICU capacity, while others can be used to create self-supporting field hospitals of all sizes.

CURA aims to improve the efficiency of existing solutions in the design of on-site hospitals to adapt them to the current pandemic. Over the past few weeks, hospitals in countries hardest hit by COVID-19 have been working to increase their ICU capacity to accommodate the growing number of patients with severe respiratory illness. The team noted that despite the evolving pandemic, more ICUs will be needed internationally in the coming months.

CURA strives to be as fast to install as a hospital tent, but works as safely as a hospital isolation ward thanks to its bio-isolation function (extractors generate negative indoor pressure, compliant with AIIR standards for airborne infection isolation rooms) . The design follows the COVID-19 hospital standards issued by the Chinese authorities while speeding up implementation.

The CURA pod is considered a ready-to-use solution as shipping containers can easily be moved by different shipping methods and reused around the world. Each pod will contain all the medical equipment needed for two COVID-19 intensive care patients - including ventilators and IV poles. In addition, individual units can be connected by inflatable corridors.