At present, the COVID-19 virus is spreading internationally,

and all walks of life have tried their best to fight the epidemic.

Among them, a hospital in Italy built and installed the first prototype of

an open-source project to create a plug-in intensive care unit (ICU) from shipping containers.

CURA (Latin acronym for "connected unit for respiratory diseases" and "treatment unit")

 proposes a rapidly deployable solution to expand emergency facilities

and reduce the pressure on healthcare systems to treat coronavirus-infected patients.

It is hoped that the finished product of the project can be installed as quickly as a hospital tent,

but must have comprehensive biological protection equipment and be as safe as an ordinary isolation ward.

Jointly designed by Carlo Ratti and Italo Rota,

the first Cura pod was installed on April 19, 2020 in a makeshift hospital in Turin, northern Italy,

one of the worst in the pandemic one of the regions.

Each unit is housed in a 20-foot intermodal container and repurposed with biological containment equipment:

the extractor creates a negative indoor pressure that meets AIIRs standards for airborne infection isolation rooms.

The two glass windows of the ICU project are engraved on the opposite side of the container,

so that doctors can keep abreast of the patient's condition inside and outside the container.

It also allows outside visitors to visit their relatives in a safer and more humane environment.

Each pod works autonomously and can be quickly transported anywhere

in the world to suit the needs of local medical infrastructure.

The first Cura pod was built and installed within the framework of a temporary hospital

set up by Italy's top health authority in the former OGR industrial park in the city of Turin,

providing the hospital with additional ICU wards.

The pod contained all the medical equipment needed for the two ICU patients,

including ventilators and monitors, as well as IV poles and syringe drivers.

The outer layer of the unit is connected to the rest of the hospital

by means of inflatable structures that are used as storage and changing rooms.

It is worth mentioning that this inflatable device can potentially

be used to connect multiple pods to form multiple modular configurations,

which can be used both in a hospital and as a stand-alone field hospital.

Pictures courtesy of  designboom and max tomasinelli