The Trump Administration is considering a plan in which student housing owners could master lease their assets to create makeshift hospital beds to provide support during the coronavirus, according to remarks Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker made during a webinar. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the White House are currently working on that, he said.
The appeal is clear from a public health perspective: The US has 924,000 total hospital beds and roughly 5% of those beds are in intensive care units, according to projections by James Lawler, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center that were reported by Axios. He believes the coronavirus will eventually lead to 4.8 million hospitalizations.