Yet new confirmed cases in the city numbered roughly 3,500 on Sunday alone. Faced with such a rapid increase, the lightly ill in the city will almost certainly be asked to keep staying at home — which only risks spreading the virus even more.

There is another solution, though: Using the tens of thousands of hotel rooms in the city, many of which currently are empty, to house people who have tested positive for the coronavirus or — given the dearth of available tests — who display mild Covid-19-like symptoms. Let’s turn hotels into temporary quarantine quarters.

Patients would be put up for free for 14 days, the standard recommended period of self-isolation. Food could be delivered. Nurses could be stationed at the hotels to check on the people who are quarantined, in particular to ensure that anyone who develops more severe symptoms can be rapidly taken to a hospital. Any member of one’s household who subsequently tested positive could move in.

Congress recently authorized hundreds of millions of dollars of stimulus spending to combat the epidemic. Some of those funds could help finance a crash campaign to help hotels — not only in New York, but throughout the country — convert themselves into quarantine centers.

At least four New York City hotels have already volunteered to provide rooms to medical personnel or patients who aren’t critically ill; Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York State, has praised their gesture. Now, state and city authorities must actively encourage more such efforts by directly compensating hotel owners who agree to turn their premises into quarantine facilities.

Los Angeles County authorities experimented with just that last week, opening a quarantine center at a Sheraton hotel in Pomona, with plans for more emergency arrangements at other hotels. Chicago is also reported to be planning on reserving some 1,000 hotel rooms in the city to ease pressure on hospitals.

New York City authorities should also organize to have public health officials train hotel employees about how to safely interact with self-isolated individuals: how to deliver meals, disinfect rooms or handle people with pneumonia like symptoms. (Taiwan has prepared a detailed guide for such procedures. Why not New York?)