Hotels Pivot to Virus Battle as N.Y. Lodges Health Workers
- City foots hotel bills for workers, expecting FEMA repayments
- Operator of Marriotts, Hyatts offers 103,000 U.S. rooms
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New York City officials have started lodging health-care workers with coronavirus symptoms in repurposed hotels, providing a template for cities across the U.S. looking for ways to keep hospital workers from infecting more people as they battle the pandemic.
The city is putting health-care workers in hundreds of hotel rooms it has secured across the five boroughs and wants to secure thousands more rooms, said Heather Roiter, the head of hazard mitigation in the city’s Office of Emergency Management. Workers with Covid-19 symptoms can quarantine in the rooms, she said, with separate spaces for asymptomatic health-care workers who want to guard against passing infections to family members.