Super Bock Arena - Rosa Mota Pavilion will be, in just over a week, the first special hospital, to fight the Covid-19 epidemic, set up in Porto. The works started today at full speed and the unit, which will serve as a backup to Hospital de São João and Santo António's General Hospital, will be finished next week, being able to receive the first patients immediately if necessary.

The facilities and beds at this "Hospital Porto." are being set up by Porto City Hall with the support of the Portuguese Army, and are intended to receive patients infected with Covid-19 but who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and do not have the possibility of being in isolation at home. These facilities can also be used by infected patients and in need of medical care due to other pathologies. It will also serve to receive patients who are in the convalescent phase, after infection by Covid-19.

Porto City Hall, together with Centro Hospitalar Universitário do Porto and Centro Hospitalar de São João, will be responsible for the logistics and Conselho Regional da Ordem dos Médicos will be in charge of the hospital management of this unit that offers excellent conditions compared to normal field hospitals.

This transformation of SuperBock Arena / Pavilhão Rosa Mota into a hospital, in record time, will allow to relieve the pressure on the two main public hospitals in the city that have been in the first line of action regarding the disease. This operation is possible thanks to the availability of the pavilion by Círculo de Cristal, concessionaire of the recently refurbished venue, after a tender launched by Porto City Hall.

Initially, the pavilion was reserved by the Municipality to be one of the reception centres for the elderly who must be relocated from old people’s homes in the city and since Sunday they are been being systematically tested. However, the Diocese of Porto offered, meanwhile, the Seminário de Vilar for this purpose, which together with Pousada da Juventude, will be enough to fulfil the isolation programme after the screening tests.

Together with the Pousada de Juventude do Porto and the Seminary, Porto City Hall will not only be able to guarantee better isolation and comfort to the elderly who test negative for Covid-19, but it will also free the Pavilion, set in the Gardens of Palácio de Cristal, for the installation of 300 hospital beds and a few minutes from Hospital de Santo António.

Yesterday, five thousand test kits for Covid-19 arrived in Portugal, offered by the Fosun Foundation and Gestifute to Porto City Hall, which will provide the National Health System with more capacity to test citizens. In the next few days, the first 50 ventilators purchased by the Municipality from a technological company in Shenzhen (China), a city twinned with Porto, will arrive in Porto, which will be destined for the São João and Santo António hospitals. Within the scope of the collaboration established with Cascais City Hall, five of these ventilators will go to the hospital in that city.

Other donations of medical protection equipment are underway, coming from several Chinese businessmen within the scope of the close collaboration that the City Hall led by Rui Moreira maintains with cities twinned with Porto such as Shenzhen, Shanghai and Macau.

[Photo ©Miguel Nogueira/CMPorto]