Building Pathology and COVID-19: A Literature Review and Commentary on Field Hospital Setting

Abstract

In 2019, there was an emerging disease, namely Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). This disease firstly emerged in Asia before there was a worldwide spreading. COVID-19 is highly contagious. The pandemic results in more than 100 million infections worldwide (by the end of January 2021). Each country has to have a good public health plan to correspond with the increasing number of the patient. To correspond with the rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 patients, finding for sufficient space for patient care is needed. The presently available number of hospitals might be limited and it usually requires an urgent setting of the new building for management of the situation. The field hospital is usually set. In this work, the authors performed a retrospective literature review to summarize the available data on building pathology and COVID-19. The aim of the study is about the quality of the field hospital buildings and the defects in the buildings. The standard databases, SCOPUS and PubMED are used for literature searching. The derived publications are summarized and extracted for a conclusion. According to the literature analysis, there are very few publications on the topic of building pathology of a field hospital for COVID-19 containment. The role of field hospital in outbreak management is confirmed in thee literature. However, the specific report regarding building pathology of field hospital is limited. The newly constructed field hospital is usually in the rapid emergency mode. Based on the present analysis, it can show that there is a lack of concern on building pathology of the field hospital. Due to the rapid construction of field hospitals for COVID-19 outbreak management, the quality control and standardization are important. Further researches on the building pathology and quality management of field hospital are recommended.