How Sacramento’s Sleep Train Arena was transformed into a coronavirus treatment facility
The defunct Sleep Train Arena has long been a ghost town: wide cracks in the parking lots sprout weeds and grayish water stains mar the facade. Even its name is obsolete, as that company has changed its name.
But these days, there’s a buzz of activity inside the Sacramento Kings’ old stomping grounds.
“When I drove here yesterday, I felt like I was entering Disneyland,” said Ryan Buras, California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services deputy director. “I was just so amazed.”
The transformation from basketball stadium to emergency coronavirus treatment facility has been nothing short of amazing.
Where once the dull cacophony of athletes’ footsteps rang through the arena, Cal Fire crews hammered together medical partitions at a sprinter’s pace.
Each bed, laid out in fresh plastic wrap, looked slightly different, an idiosyncrasy bred of their origin from the multitude of hospitals that donated them.
By Monday, the former sports venue, now known as the Sleep Train Arena alternate care facility, should be prepared to take on up to 400 COVID-19 patients in the arena and the Kings’ former practice gym, potentially from all over California.
The Sacramento Kings, who still own the 183-acre property, donated use of the site to the California Department of Public Health as an emergency overflow care center.
The training gym, equipped with nearly 80 beds, will house the more severe patients — those that have tested positive for COVID-19. The main arena will be taking on the brunt of patient inflow from hospitals overloaded with suspected cases. The remaining 300 plus beds have been situated on center court and on upper levels of the arena.
Two weeks later, a ‘fully stood-up hospital’
To get Sleep Train ready for such a task, a herculean effort was necessary.
“Fourteen days to convert this center and the other center to what you’re seeing today is a tremendous accomplishment,” Buras said.
The National Guard came out. So did the California Conservation Corps. The Kings had to load 55 tons of equipment out of the arena to make way for patients. More than 300 staff members were on board Saturday, a third of whom were Kings employees previously been out of work due to the pandemic, according to Buras. That number could go up as staffing needs increase during a future surge.
Bloom Energy, a company that has been partnering with California officials during the public health crisis, is providing natural gas to power the practice gym facility off the main grid, Buras said.
“Now we are a fully stood-up hospital, if you will,” said Gigi Fergus, the CDPH’s executive director for the newly minted alternate care facility.
Doctors and nurses have come from all over California and even out of state to work in the Sleep Train facility, Fergus said.
“We have people that are new in their career, people that are retired — we have a broad mix, but the one thing that brings them all together is they all have this desire to give back,” she said. “We’ve been very fortunate for the people that have volunteered to be here.”
Medical staff members have been acquired through the California Health Corps, a workforce initiative meant to meet the increased need for trained practitioners in the state.
COVID-19 patients requiring acute care will stay at primary hospitals, Fergus said, while less serious patients may be subject to overflow.
“We’re not going to have all the main supplies or the things that you would normally see in a hospital, but that doesn’t stop us from caring, that doesn’t stop us from providing the best care possible,” Fergus said. “If the patient requires more than we can handle, we will transfer them to a hospital.”
Since it’s designed to act as a surge facility, there may not be an immediate need, which means capacity could remain relatively low early on. There might not even be any patients showing up Monday.
“Your guess is a good as mine,” Fergus said.
Buras asked the community, which sometimes uses the empty lots of the arena for driving practice or to go on walks, to refrain while it is in use as a medical facility, and lauded the combined public and private efforts to get Sleep Train ready.
“This is what California is about,” he said.
This story was originally published April 20, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
