Chilling images show the giant liquid oxygen tanks being used at a make-shift NHS Nightingale hospital in Yorkshire.
Construction at the Harrogate Convention Centre is ongoing today as health bosses plan to get the temporary hospital up and running as soon as possible.
Contractors were this afternoon pictured working on the entrances to ambulance bays at the facility. It is unclear when it will be ready for use.
Health chiefs last week announced the make-shift site would be able to care for up to 500 patients across Yorkshire.
One of the five Nightingale hospitals – the 4,000-bed facility at the ExCel Centre in the Docklands, London – in England is already operational.
The huge liquid oxygen tanks pictured outside the Yorkshire hospital will feed the gas into life support machines, which breathe for critically ill coronavirus patients.
The vital pieces of equipment are used to get oxygen into the blood when the lungs don’t work, and people could die without them.
Chilling images show the giant liquid oxygen tanks being used at a make-shift NHS Nightingale hospital in Yorkshire
One of the liquid oxygen tanks outside the Harrogate Nightingale Hospital dwarfs the two vans it stands next to
Health chiefs last week announced the Harrogate Convention Centre would become a temporary hospital that could care for up to 500 patients
The workers responsible for transforming the Harrogate Convention Centre into the Nightingale Hospital have been put up in hotels and b&bs while carrying out the project.
More than 5,400 cases of the life-threatening coronavirus have been recorded in the North East and Yorkshire, official figure show.
Only London (12,636), the Midlands (7,385) and the North West (5,549) have been hit harder since the crisis began.
It comes after the ExCel Centre’s Abu Dhabi-based owners backed down on plans to bill the NHS up to £3million-a-month for using their centre.
Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company, Adnec, said in a statement it would scrap a ‘contribution to some fixed costs’.
The NEC in Birmingham, owned by US private equity giant Blackstone, as well as the Manchester Central Complex both said they would not charge the NHS.
The ExCel Centre was converted into a Nightingale hospital in nine days to care for 4,000 patients within 80 wards, making it one of the largest in the world.
The NHS’s chief executive Simon Stevens called the building of the London hospital ‘nothing short of extraordinary’.
Prince Charles officially opened the hospital on April 3 and said he hoped it would bring a message of ‘hope for those who will need it most’.
Nightingale hospitals are also planned for the University of the West of England in Bristol, and the Harrogate Convention Centre.
Contractors work on the entrance to ambulance bays at the Nightingale Hospital Yorkshire
The ExCel centre, owned by Ahu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company, reversed its decision to charge the NHS up to £3million-a-month to use its facility
The UK has declared 439 more deaths caused by the coronavirus today, taking the total to 5,373, and 3,802 new positive tests have pushed the number of patients up to 51,608.
In a glimmer of hope after a dark week for Britain, the number of people dying of COVID-19 has now fallen for two days in a row and today dropped 30 per cent from 621 yesterday.
Today’s death count is the lowest since March 31, last Tuesday, when it was 381, and marks a 39 per cent fall from the UK’s worst day so far, Saturday, when the deaths of 708 people were recorded.
England accounted for 403 of the fatalities while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland declared 36 more deaths between them over the past day.
The figures come as Prime Minister Boris Johnson remains in hospital with ‘persistent’ symptoms after he was admitted last night because his fever had lasted for 10 days after he was diagnosed. He spent the night in hospital but aides say he is still trying to work and he said in a tweet he is ‘in good spirits’.
A Cabinet Minister, Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick, said authorities will start to consider easing the UK’s lockdown in the coming weeks if the numbers of people being admitted to hospital remains stable. There are fears a long quarantine will cause permanent damage to the economy and the NHS appears to be coping well so far.
However, for normality to return experts say antibody tests – which reveal who has already recovered from COVID-19 – will be necessary. But leading scientists have warned the UK is at least a month away from having any that work, adding that all the kits that have been checked already have ‘not performed well’ and are not worth using.
More optimistic statistics come as countries around Europe, including Italy, Spain and Germany, appear to be seeing death rates fall – Germany’s outbreak appears to have hit is peak already with just 1,600 deaths.