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Army Lt. Gen. Todd T. Semonite News Conference on Updates to the Army Corps of Engineers' Support to the Defense Department's COVID-19 Efforts

Updated information and slides related to this briefing can be found at: https://www.usace.army.mil/Coronavirus/

STAFF: Good afternoon everybody. I'm Army Colonel Sunset Belinsky.

Today we have Lieutenant General Todd Semonite. He's calling in from the Convention Center near Miami Beach in Florida. General Semonite will give a few opening comments. We'll go to the phone for the first couple questions. We'll come back to the room. Please tell us your name and your outlet when I call you for questions.

With that, over to you, General Semonite?

LIEUTENANT GENERAL TODD T. SEMONITE: So thanks. First of all, Sunset, I just I want to make sure you can hear me loud and clear.

STAFF: We're good, sir.

GEN. SEMONITE: OK. So listen, thanks everybody for being on the net today. I do want to be able to continue to keep you up-to-date every couple of days on what we're seeing and how we continue to see this evolve. If just in the event that someone doesn't know, I'm going to give you an exceptionally short summary of what the plan is and how the plan has evolved.

The Corps, we basically -- this is, without a doubt, the most important thing we're doing. We've got over 15,000 people in the Corps: engineers, scientists, contracting, fully engaged in this. And we're completely engaged across all 50 states, all the territories, and continue to be working this on all different parameters.

You’ve heard me say in the past, we've started out with a standard design, and we really thought that most of this might have been non-COVID, which was the overflow coming out of the hospitals. But we always designed a COVID and a non-COVID option, and then we really went into this with smaller phases, which I would call hotel, dormitories, and old hospitals. We can talk about that because we were seeing more growth there. But also we had the bigger option: convention centers and field houses. And the bigger capability allows you to have a little bit different ratio when it comes to staff versus patients. So, what we've really seen is the majority of the facilities that we're building out are much more on the bigger open-based space.

What we've done though in the last three weeks is every time we build we're very aggressive in taking all the lessons learned of what we're seeing in the current build. And because every one of these is site-adapted, every single one is custom-built, we are able to continue to build into our repository of the standard design different ways we're dealing with things. And so obviously, we saw just in Javits alone, how would you convert a non-COVID into a COVID? Now we have the procedures on how to be able to do that. We've learned a lot about oxygen in the last couple of weeks, and now in a lot of these facilities we're putting in not only oxygen and tanks, but what's much more efficient is where we can put an entire oxygen system in so there's an oxygen capability right at the actual bedside of the patient.

Then I think the other thing we've learned here in the last week or so, it really goes back to how do you set-up in an integrated facility. It's one thing to think about a bunch of beds in a large area, but how do you go all the way to where the ambulances pull in? What is the way you offload patients that are infected, and then get them into a receiving area of some sort then able to bring them in and triage? How do you assign them to certain beds?

Then on the other end, where you have perhaps a clean end, how does staff come in and to be able to report for work? What do we do as far as areas for the nurses and the doctors to have a respite, to go up and watch TV for 15 minutes or to call home? And then in the middle of all of this, how do you move from a contaminated space to a clean space and vice-versa? So, where do you have negative pressure and not negative pressure? Where do you have the ability to be able to take off a contaminated mask or a gown, put that in an area where that now is segregated, go in to be able to go to a break room or get ready to go home for the night and come back in the morning and go do the reverse? So, really, really, this ability to have a standard design that is site-adapted and we can continue to push it down, we're evolving every single day.

I just finished a 45-minute news conference with Governor DeSantis down here. I'm going to walk you through at the end of the latest build that we just started.

What I would like to do is ask my staff, and they're on the machine there, to go ahead and be able to pull up Slide Number 2. And I only show this to you so you know what product we're putting on the website. Slide Number 2 is what we call our placemats. I don't expect you to read it here on the big screen, but it basically gives you what has happened in the last 24 hours, what are some of the hospitals that are either tentative or ones that are coming down. And you can have a little bit of an understanding of what's happened in the next 48 hours. It talks about our funding, it lays out by every single FEMA region where we're at. Then it actually has a summary at the bottom that actually talked about how many arenas, how many hotels, how many are completed, and how many are pending.

And so let's go to the next slide. And this is a slide that is actually called "infographics slide.” I think you've seen this. And this is the same type of information, but it's just arrayed a little bit more user-friendly where you can kind of look at what are the different numbers on here.

And as I look down through, you can see when we talk about, let's say, assessments. So far to date we have been asked to do 914 different assessments. This could be all the way from 2,000-bed convention center down to a 100-bed hotel room. And then my staff goes out with a mechanical engineer, a civil engineer. We look at the entire thing. We do up about a 25-page report that goes back into the mayor or the governor that gives them what we think is our best understanding of the utility of that particular capability. You might talk about real estate, you might talk about codes, but the ability to be able to kind of walk down through the assessment.

The sheet I'm going to go next is what I call the roll-up, and this is one which is the active projects. I would pay attention to the blocks at the bottom and if you can't read them, I'm going to read them out. They go basically in order from the ones that are just assessments. You'll see the 914 there in the gray box.

There are about 22 facilities, which we call "Tentative". The governors haven't decided; the mayors haven't decided. It's an area where we're concerned about a bed shortage, but we haven't actually been told to do anything yet. So we haven't contracted it and FEMA has not turned us on.

When you go to the yellow box and it's called the "Pending" category. This is one we're probably within 96 hours of executing. You can see the numbers there, about 23 facilities on the order of merit of about 8,500 beds. A good example here is that we might find that the contract is all ready to go, the governor’s all ready to go. But, we've got to go back in with perhaps the leaser and to be able to work the final negotiations on the lease. So, we're real close.

There are times that those - some of those get added at the last minute. Some of them fall back out. But I kind of wanted to give you an order of magnitude of what's out there in the yellow.

The blue is an important category, and most people don't understand this. All of those assessments which were done, those 834, we actually do a cursory design. We kind of say, “if you were to do this facility, we would think this would be adequate for 250 COVID and we would put X amount of nurses' stations, X amount of beds.” Do we do oxygen? We kind of lay out in about a 35 percent design kind of what it looks like.

And then we go right to the governors and the mayors and we say, "We can certainly do this for you under a mission assignment. But on the other hand, if you want to be able to contract this yourself, if you want to have total control of this, then feel free to go forth and take any of these designs and then execute it yourself." And that's the power of the idea here. It's not that you need the federal government to come in. We are providing free of charge an assessment out there -- an assessment -- and then the state is executing those particular USACE designs.

If you look at the blue numbers here, it's about 17 facilities, about 5,800 beds. And some of these are done, some of these are not done. So don't necessarily assume that those are all 100 percent complete. But just like any of or all the ones, they're all in the process of being done.

Now the greens are actually what's being built, and this is that we are building. This is today's numbers, 17 facilities, 15,000. You can see the different states that are on here that basically lay out these big builds. Almost all of these are COVID. There are two that are not, Stony Brook and Old Westbury. And then you can roughly see what is the Award Date, Start Date, and Complete Date.

I want to tell you that I'm not satisfied with the Complete Date. That's the day that our contractor is told to have it 100 percent done. That's the day that we negotiated. But what we're doing is we're pushing them hard to be able to work 24/7 and to try to figure out how to bring that date to the left. Here's why.

Since we talked to you last, we have continued to refine our models. There are several different models. And, obviously, Vice President Pence and the White House use a couple of those different ones. We now have integrated three of the different models to be able to come up with, to a degree, what we think is our best date when there's going to be a peak bed demand. And then we really talk to the city and the mayor, and then we really look at that assessment and figure out where do we need to have that facility done. Here's a great idea.

In Miami today, I think the actual contract that we cut down here was to have this done by the 27th of April. When I just had the governor in my mobile command post here, the mayor, I mean, the governor said, "We think our need is going to be to the left of that." I said, "Governor, what do you think it is?" He says, "I think I need to have this done by the night of the 20th." So this is where our capability is with our contracting and our contractors. Really an extremely aggressive approach is to try to say we have to be left of need.

So this goes back to every one of these cities is different. If you have seen the curve, some are like spikes, some are plateaus. Some are going maybe two or three weeks to the right, which gives us more time. Some maybe are not, and they're staying right about where they are. But we have to hand-tailor every single build to the actual date that we think the need is.

If you can look at this, there's a couple of big ones. Stony Brook is looking really good. That's about a 1,000-person one. And that's one done by a contractor and five gigantic great big white tents. And I'm going to go there soon and I'll be able to brief you back on Stony Brook, New York, but that -- we're looking real hard at -- what's called the Novi, Michigan, Suburban Showplace. That's another about 1,100. We cut that contract in the last couple days, so that build started three days ago. We've got some smaller ones in New Mexico, California, other places in Illinois. Then the other one that I'm excited about is the one in Denver. That's a 2,000-person facility. We cut that contract since I talked to you last, and 6 April we've started to build.

Now before I take questions, I just want to go through a couple what I call the "quad charts." And then for the ones that are green, we are providing you a simple quad chart. Let's go ahead and pull up McCormick Place. And this is the one that's our guys have done a great job. But the total here is 3,000 beds. What we can't do is just build out 3,000 and then turn it when it's all done. So, we have gone into this and we have basically broken them into different sections.

This particular one has A Hall and a B and a Hall C. We have turned this over incrementally where we are definitely way ahead in need, and we are in a very, very good place to continue to have several hundred beds before they actually are putting people in. I don't have the exact date of when the first patient goes in there, but I think it's one or two days away. And I would defer back to the city of Chicago to give me the exact date of when the patient goes in.

There are sometimes when we might be done, but then there's a state inspector, a city inspector comes in, some degree of training for the staff. So there might be one or two-day delay between when we're done and when actually the first patient goes in. So, that one is going very smooth.

Governor Pritzker did a roll-out on that last Friday, along with my Division Commander General Bob Whittle, and again our Chicago District built this out with the unbelievable capability, and then also put oxygen throughout the entire facility. And I think it's well done. All the nurses’ stations are up, the water, all the capabilities.

Let's go to the next one. I want to just give you a walk-through. This is Detroit, very, very similar. This is a little small. This is 970. You can't see it on the slide, but basically you'll see a lot of blue up in the upper right corner. Those are all the beds where all of those different patients would be. And in every area we have pink, the pink are the nurses' stations. Normally the ratio is about one nurses' station to about 10 to 15 beds.

And so this is one where Governor Whitmer and I walked through a couple of days ago. It's fully stocked, all ready to go, and now they are continuing to work through the other pieces that continue to remind me, and I use the analogy of the three-legged school. There are three S’s to this stool. Sites. That's what the Corps of Engineers is working under FEMA with HHS, the governors and the mayors.

The second S is the supplies. That is something that is in HHS or a local or state job. So unfortunately, if you asked me a lot of questions about supplies today, I'm not going to be the best person to be able to answer those for you.

And then the third S is the staff. And clearly, that is something that many, many different players of federal government working side by side to be able to make sure they have adequate staff. And Detroit is another one where we've learned an awful lot, and the entire team coming together to help us.

Let me go through really quick this one here that we're doing in Miami. The governor here in Miami actually thinks they are pretty close to having enough capacity in the local hospital. And what they have done is just in case they need more or in case the curve changes an awful lot or they have more of a spike than a flat curve or they have an exponential versus a linear curve, then they built this out so that they would have capability. This is designed as a 450-bed facility, 400 COVID, acute. So these are a little bit less severe patients, and those are going to be very, very similar to a Javits or a McCormick area. About a 12 by 12 with good hard walls on three sides, beds, lights, nurses' call station. I mean, all the stuff that's in there.

But on this one we also did 50 ICUs. We have not necessarily built these before. This is a self-contained – think of it as a plastic box that comes in. It's a little bit bigger. It's about 15 by 15-foot. It is sealed to the floor. It has negative pressure in that plastic box, so we then suck out the air that is going into it. And that way all of any contamination would stay inside.

There's a closed door to be able to have nurses to access in and out of that. And then there's all the things that the staff would need inside that: the equipment, all of the oxygen, air, and all of the other kind of things that's required in there. But this is another one where this particular facility, while it is only being built out for 450, we're actually only using half of the facility. And there's actually room for another 450 if, in fact, need be.

Great contractor down here on the ground. We just walked through and gave the governor a tour with his staff. The TAG of the National Guard - Director and an unbelievable contractor who's right now working 24/7 to be able to get this done.

What I told the governor here in the press conference about an hour ago is the same thing you heard me say before, this is probably a three-week build. Today is the 8th of April. We don't have three weeks to build this. I told my guys, "Get this done by the night of the 20th of April and then figure it out." And then we got to go all-in, whatever we've got to do with the contract capability.

This particular one, we think there's a piece of equipment that we might need from Albany, New York. We probably got to fly it in. So right now we're looking at how do I go get planes to be able to fly equipment in here to be able to make sure we can solve that particular shortage because there's not time to deal with red tape. There's not time to deal with the bureaucracy. All of us have to be focused like a laser beam to be able to support the mayors and the governors to be able to take care of their shortage.

So with that, Sunset, I'm going to pass back to you and we'll let the team ask whatever questions they want to. And I'll try to field as many as I can, over.

STAFF: Thanks, sir. Team, we've only got about 15 minutes with General Semonite, so I'd ask you to keep your question to one question and one follow-up. We're going to start with Lita on the phone.

Go ahead, Lita.

Q: Hi. Thank you, General. A quick question. I couldn't see the cost, but can you give us a summary of roughly how much you think you've spent to date, what you think you're going to need, and just give us a picture of the money situation right now, and if you can also talk a little bit about Florida more broadly. Last time we talked you said you were personally worried about Florida. Other than Miami, do you see broader needs throughout the state and where do you see future takes coming as you look down the road if it's in Florida or other places? Thank you.

GEN. SEMONITE: Yeah. So the way this works, every time we get turned on, the term is called "mission assignment". And in a mission assignment, it doesn't necessarily equate to a hospital. Sometimes we do planning and assessment. But we have been turned on right now for $1.6 billion that is mainly the green. So when I talk about the oranges that are pending, we have not been turned on. But I mean, I've been working with FEMA now for seven years and I don't want to get ahead of FEMA, but there has not normally been any financial challenges here when we have a validated need coming from a city or a mayor. So we don't know what that number is going to be.

And then the other thing, Lita, that's important here, we're beginning to run out of time. What we used to have is a month to build this and maybe a week or two for a mayor to make a decision. I think that we will probably be done starting new builds in probably a week. Now that depends on what the card is, but this is not just going to continue to play out. And this virus gets a vote. This virus is deciding where it's going faster than normal, where it's leveling the curve, and so the actual build-out schedule, we just kind of see how this thing actually has to play out.

And then your second question, Lita, real quick, was what?

Q: Sorry.

GEN. SEMONITE: Oh, other parts of Florida.

Q: Where? 

GEN. SEMONITE: Yeah.

Q: What other place? You talked about Florida or being your personal concerns, where else?

GEN. SEMONITE: The reason I said that last week is that I didn't see us actually doing any construction. So I sent my colonels down in here to talk to the governor's staff and said what are your plans. And he basically said today we've been working side by side with the Corps, but we decided this was a good safety net. There are other hospitals that the governor has that they have done work on.

I'm not necessarily privy to those , but when he was briefing today, he mentioned at least two others that are down here. They're very worried about the counties that are the most populous. I mean, there's a lot of Florida that has a lot of great capability. But right now, the governor feels that the 450 build in Florida takes care of him.

I think this is where you talked about crosstalk. Saturday afternoon about five o'clock we were working some other things, and Governor DeSantis called me. He goes, "Hey, General Semonite, so what is your capability and what do you think? Should we build this or not?" And I said, "Sir, you will not go wrong if you build it," and somebody -- we find out that there's 100 beds that didn't get used. We're way past that. This is having the ability to be able to think through the worst-case and get ahead of it why he has it done.

OK. Lita, thanks for the question.

STAFF: We'll go to Idrees please.

Q: Sure. If I can just follow-up, you said they were or you were beginning to run out of time. Could you expand on that? What specifically were you referring to when you said beginning to run out of time? And is there a sense of how many site assessments you're going to do when this is all said and done? Are we talking, you know, tens of thousands or what's your expectation?

GEN. SEMONITE: No, I think that the vast majority of the assessments we did, the 914, most of those have either or they were smaller facilities, so when we come in and build 1,000, some of those might get to be OBE (overcome by events). I think you will find, and this is me guessing, about two weeks out, we will build these greens out, the 17. And I think that these 23 oranges will probably have a high probability, maybe not all of them, but the vast majority of those will probably be built out.

I think you're looking at something less than 50. The other thing we're seeing is that we are seeing some facilities that three days ago we might have been prepared to actually build out. They've canceled because they aren't seeing the level of patient requirement. They're seeing the curve be more to the left or they're seeing a much flatter plateau.

So I think we're looking at 40 to 50 maybe at the most and that probably includes [INAUDIBLE...] about 40. That's not quite including the blues that the states build out. But it's just too early to probably tell because this is really a local decision, and we will support whatever the city wants or whatever FEMA authorize us to build, over.

STAFF: Thank you, sir. We'll go to…

Q: Sir, you just addressed the beginning to run out of time, what was that then reference to specifically?

GEN. SEMONITE: Well, if we think based on all of our modeling, and I'll just make a notional example here, let's assume that some city thinks that worst-case is going to be the 24th of April. And all of a sudden, they have not made a decision yet and I need three weeks to build. There's a point where you’ve got to say, “Do you still need to build that or not?” Or there are other things that the state needs to do.

So I mean, we'll continue to support this. I'm not going to say no, but at some given point, this goes back to, “Are you going to be able to get a facility done by the time you’re at max patients?” And these curves, if they start falling off pretty quick then you'll see those hospitals have enough capacity that a facility that we do build might not be needed. And again that's really the mayor's call, but that's trying to work to get in to read the tea leaves that I don't see a lot of new builds come in probably after about the next week.

STAFF: We're going to go to Jennifer in the room please.

Q: Sir, it's Jennifer Griffin from Fox News. It's certainly impressive the number of facilities that you've gotten up and running in the last few weeks. But right now, the U.S. military is only treating at the Javits Center 104 patients. In Seattle, no patients; on the Comfort 58 patients.

There are some doctors we've talked to who say that Army bureaucracy, military bureaucracy, makes it too difficult to send patients over to those facilities. Why? What is the hold-up in places like Javits Center, which are ready to receive patients? Why so few beds built?

GEN. SEMONITE: Yeah, Jennifer, I'm sure that's a great question. Unfortunately, I'm probably not the right guy to assess that. I get my guidance on the Secretary of Defense to say you make sure we have the facility available. And then when it comes to the actual patient care, the capability in some of those DOD facilities, then I would probably refer that back into DOD. I hate to say it, but we're moving fast and I've got to try not to be distracted. And right now what I'm doing is when I get a requirement with the Corps, we're building that requirement out.

After the fact, when it comes back to what's the patient count in those facilities, I think that's probably [INAUDIBLE...] best answered by the medical experts versus as an engineer, over.

Q: Thank you.

STAFF: We'll go to Tom in the room.

Q: I just had a quick follow-up on that one.

GEN. SEMONITE: Go ahead.

Q: Just on that note, general, are you doing..?

STAFF: It's Ryan Browne, General.

Q: Yeah, Ryan Browne of CNN. Are you doing any kind of lessons learned about the future facilities you're building because if you're building a 2,500-bed facility and it's not being used, wouldn't that inform how you assess requirements moving forward?

GEN. SEMONITE: Yeah, I think it would. We actually are doing a series of AARs (after action reviews) in the Corps of Engineers internally. The question is that it might be premature. We don't know where this thing is going to go. And at the end of the day, we've got to sit down sometime in the middle of June and July and really figure it out. I think, and this is me talking personally now, what does America need with respect to excess facilities in the event of a pandemic virus, what is that requirement, and how is that requirement apportioned? Is that done through civilian hospitals? Is that done through temporary construction? That is going to be a whole-of-government decision, and we'll certainly support whatever those decisions are.

I think the other big question, John, it has to be asked. And again premature for me to worry about right now, but what do you do with these facilities? Let's hope that we come down off these curves. And all of a sudden we are in the pick a month, June, July, August, whenever, where we can hopefully get back to normal. Then the question is do we pare these back down or do we leave these up? And that is the question that's obviously FEMA is going to have to wrestle with and, I think the local and state governments going to have to wrestle with. But this is something we've not dealt with in America certainly in the last 40 or 50 years.

And we're in this for the short game. This is the ability to get through these curves in the next couple of weeks. There is a much, much bigger question, and you're hitting it right on the head, what is a longer plan there? And maybe it's something like what we've done in some of them.

This one is a 900 capacity facility, we're only building 450. If we see the curve go fast, we've got to be able to get the read to throw another 450 in, but maybe these are more incremental. Right now, that is not my task. My task is when FEMA tells me to build, you know, 2,000 in Denver. We're going in to build 2,000. And we'll let all the AARs in the next several months with the government to figure out was this prudent or not.

And I think when you have a life at stake, most of the time, you know, we don't want to necessarily try to figure out how to save a lot of money. I hate to say that money is not important, but the last thing we want to do is have someone die because they didn't have adequate beds available.

STAFF: We're going to go to Tom in the room, and then back to the phone lines.

Q: General, you mentioned at the outset that you always designed a COVID and non-COVID option. But if I look at what you're constructing, it's almost all COVID. Now what are these? Is that changed over the past few weeks because we saw that Javits go from non-COVID to COVID. Is this changing because of the need? But you always anticipate building almost all COVID.

GEN. SEMONITE: No, this is probably changing, Tom, a little bit of experience on what people are seeing. Non-COVID is easier to build, and if you can empty non-COVID out of hospitals and put them in there, then clearly, you know, then you can put COVID in the regular hospitals.

I think there's probably some concern in some states that if you build non-COVID and all of a sudden you have one threat that pops up in that, now have you basically challenged the entire facility. What we've seen in the last couple of weeks is most of the governors and the mayors that have asked us to build have gone a little bit more of a safer stance of doing COVID and that way you have the ability to flex. We have found that Apple Convention Center is COVID. The other half is non-COVID. So I think it's a little bit more of worst-case scenario.

And then there were some of these that we started two weeks ago, it was TBD. The local officials didn't know. And then once we give them advice as to what really is the depths of their health care program and their plan, then we're able to build what they want. But this is not the Corps trying to push an agenda, this is much more of the senior leaders in that state deciding what is the best thing that supports their state health care plan, over.

STAFF: All right, sir. We're going to go to Tara from McClatchy please.

Q: Hi, General Semonite. Thank you again for taking our calls. Are there any hotspots left that have not had a hospital assessment that you think might not be prepared for...

GEN. SEMONITE: Oh, every day I have my modelers sit down and we look at all of the hotspots. We look through a vast inventory. We actually have a database of how many beds and how many ICUs are in every state or city hotspot. And we're now getting into details, there are times every day, about three or four cities, I ask my staff what's going on in City Number 3, go down there and find the plan.

Sometimes we are favorably impressed where there actually is a great plan. We don't have visibility of all the hospitals or all the hotels we've been ordered and it's not a problem. Although it might be a hotspot, the city is way ahead of it and they've got a great plan.

These oranges we are continuing to push our leadership right now. We've got to tell leaders you've got to figure out, make a decision pretty soon, because there could be a scenario where we can't get them built out. And I know you're dying to ask me where those are, but this is where every one of these cities and mayors has to make that personal determination. Where do you see the risk, and are you able to mitigate that risk and enough.

And if you are, that's great. If not, we have a proposed solution to be able to help you out. But I don't want to think we're just waiting for the phone to ring, we have to be aggressive. And this is how this whole thing started.

When Cuomo asked us three weeks ago, "Hey, I need help in New York," when I flew back to D.C. that night, we were smart enough to know that this is going to happen somewhere in America, all throughout the United States. And maybe it's the big gigantic urban centers, maybe it's a little tiny town that doesn't have a capability, but it's incumbent on every single elected official to be able to think through the depth of your shortage and then make sure that you're taking care of your people that have a good response.

So, Tara, we will know more in time, but I feel more and more comfortable, but I still lay awake at night worrying about a couple of places.

STAFF: We're going to go to Luis Martinez.

Q: And I'm sorry for the noise in the background. Somebody is taking down a tree in my neighborhood. But a quick follow, so let's say you don't name the cities, but let's say a city does get overrun, didn't do the work in time, will the Army Corps of Engineers -- are you willing to go in after the fact then in putting a hospital or is it too late at that point?

GEN. SEMONITE: No, we definitely are. We actually have now thought through a couple options where we've modified some of our processes. We know the vendors. We know where we can get things fast. We know quicker ways to build. We actually have a couple of containerized solutions we're developing right now where if we do have a problem on time, then how can we go back in?

And this is where it might not necessarily be exactly the facility [INAUDIBLE...], but some of these that -- where we went through the whole-of-hotel concept, the neat thing with the hotel concept was it was a faster build. We could build it faster than the convention center, probably lower numbers. But if there's somewhere we need 200 or 300, we can go into, you know, a regular normal hotel on the side of an interstate and convert that a little bit faster. So we're watching very carefully. And the bottom line at the end of the day, the Corps will continue to step up to do what you need to do to be able to mitigate wherever the shortage is.

We're going to go to Luis Martinez please.

And hearing nothing, we'll go to Sydney please.

Q: Hi, General. Sydney Freedberg, Breaking Defense. The aim of your slides went fast and really fast for those of us on the outstations. If y'all can send them to us, it'll be a great resource.

Second, you've mentioned that you have 40 to 50 sites. Can you give us a sense of, since you're focusing on now large sites vice the small sites how many beds do you actually have built, have in the works and having that probable category, that orange category, and what the time frame is for getting that number of beds ramped up. Because that's ultimately what we're talking about is how many patients you can accommodate. That's where the metric ultimately of success.

GEN. SEMONITE: Yeah. And so, Sydney, let me -- I'll just give you the rough orders that we're getting. We have a website that actually it's on the bottom of our infographics and basically go to USACE, usace.army.mil and you'll be able to pull up our website. Every day we publish all of our stuff. So let me just give you a generic answer, but the details are all on the website.

We are in the process of building 17 at about 15,000 beds. Now, Javits is a great example where that's done. It's 98 percent complete. There's another one that maybe we haven't started. That's on the sheet you can look at.

The oranges, that pending number is probably another 23, and that is on the order of magnitude of about 8,000. So I think those are the two big bins. Green means under contract. My guys [INAUDIBLE...], and hammers and nails are going down and we're building today.

The 23 facilities means that we've only got a couple of days left to be able to turn on and still get it done in time. And some of those will go, some of those probably will not. But go on the -- on the website if you need to and you could pull all these details off.

And I actually have gone out a way to be able to say here's the award date, here's the day we're starting construction, here's the day we're completing construction, but you all need to know that that's the contract completion date, that is not my expectation. I've got to beat everyone these days for the Corps of Engineers. That just goes back to the talent I've got in my team to be able to figure out how can we save 15 or 20 percent of time by expediting construction going faster, getting approval faster.

A good example down here, I told the governor today, "If we got a question at three in the morning, I don't have time to wait eight hours to have your senior doc come down and tell us left or right. I need to call somebody up in an hour and get an answer. And -- and it might not be the absolute perfect answer, but it's got to be the good enough answer, so we can keep building. And that's a yes. I think that’s what the entire federal family and the state family are doing is get these things done ahead of need. And right now I don't personally see anywhere we're going to break, but this is high adventure every single day.

Thanks, Sydney.

STAFF: General Semonite, we're about out of time, sir. If you have any final comments, I'll turn that over to you.

GEN. SEMONITE: So just we want to be as transparent as we can. We'll continue to tell you what's going on out there. I do think that -- and regardless if we ever have another pandemic again, it is important that cities have a capability in reserve. And then the more that we can figure out what does the design look like on a shelf, in that way if there is something, we don't need to be scrambling two or three weeks ahead of time. We can go back and pull the designs from 2020. This looked good enough and then how do we modify it.

I always like to try to stay ahead of the problem instead of trying to catching the problem. We got ahead of this one, we're still ahead of it. But the more that cities and states have no prudent plans on the shelf to be able to take care of any kind of a disaster, be it a hurricane, tornado, or a pandemic virus like this, then that just makes the execution somewhat easier since we've already worked with the plan.

So listen, with that, we'll continue to talk to you. My plan is to go Friday to another location. We're just building Denver. It's going to be a big one, so I plan to report back from Denver. Stony Brook is going to be a big one. And then once I can announce where some of the oranges are, I want to get out as soon as I can and see my guys building.

That's all for me and thanks so much for being on the net.

STAFF: Thank you, sir.

Q: Thank you.