A wave of coronavirus patients is already hitting Memphis hospitals, a top local expert said, and state officials and the Army Corps of Engineers are expected to announce the location of a new 1,000-bed hospital in Memphis in the coming days.

"We really need to get the message out. We have already 70 or more patients," Dr. Manoj Jain, the infectious disease expert advising the city of Memphis, told Shelby County Commissioners in a conference call Wednesday.

"I'm an infectious disease doctor, I go in and see patients . . . Hospitals already have 70 or more COVID-19 patients who are taking up the beds in ICUs and over 140 who are potential COVID positive patients."

"So that volume is already coming into our hospitals in a big way. And the public just doesn't know that, I believe," Jain said.

Jain's pronouncement about supplies and beds and the revelation about the soon-to-be-established hospital help illustrate the near wartime-footing the Memphis-area is on. A call has gone out to retired nurses and doctors to rejoin the workforce and help with expected rush of patients.

And officials have asked for other skilled, volunteer labor as well to make up the gaps in distributing food, providing social services and the logistics of coordinating a massive response to the pandemic.

Shortage of hospital beds, ventilators

Jain also said the Memphis area doesn't have enough hospital beds, nor enough equipment.

"The number of hospital beds we have — say about 3,000. We need to be thinking double that," he said.

A similar shortage exists in the number of intensive care unit beds. "Right now at 500. We need to be thinking six or eight times as more ICU beds. We have ventilators, about 700. We need to be looking three times as many. Any way you calculate it, it’s a one or two multiplier for the need that we have."

The doctor's comments underscore the danger of the viral outbreak in Memphis and the threat that it might overwhelm the city's hospital resources, leading to preventable deaths. This scenario has played out in parts of Italy and now in New York City.

A national health statistics institute, IHME, has predicted hospital usage in Tennessee will peak on April 19. That estimate is not broken out for Memphis. Jain said he's waiting for a new model from Vanderbilt University.

Announcement coming soon on new hospital

At a news conference, Wednesday, Alisa Haushalter, Director of the Shelby County Health Department, said she expected the state government and the Army Corps of Engineers to announce where they would place a 1,000-bed hospital.

“My understanding is they’re hoping to name that facility within days,” she said.

The new hospital would likely go into an existing building.

The Memphis and Shelby County joint coronavirus task force has submitted more than a dozen sites to the state of Tennessee and the Army Corps that ran the gamut of what the area has to offer, including higher education sites, meeting spaces and retail.

A city official said the task-force expected to learn from the Army Corps where the site would be on Wednesday ahead of a potential announcement this week.

The Tennessee Department of Military, which is the state's National Guard, is also involved in the process of creating the hospital.

The efforts to build a hospital in a matter of days or weeks is a tactic first seen in China, where the novel coronavirus originated.

In the U.S., the Army Corps of Engineers and Defense Department have shouldered the task in the past several weeks. At present, the Corps is working to convert New York City’s Javits Center into a 3,000-bed hospital and has scouted hundreds of sites across the country to find other suitable locations, according to multiple media reports.

In other cities, these new hospitals have been used to serve either coronavirus patients or other patients who don't have the virus. It's not clear what route would be used in Memphis.

The city's new 1,000-bed temporary hospital would dwarf most other hospitals in the Memphis area. Baptist's flagship hospital on Walnut Grove has 770 beds, according to data from the American Hospital Directory. Only one hospital in Memphis has more than 1,000: Methodist University, with 1,362.

Jain said the Memphis Medical Society is working to find retired medical workers willing to help staff hospital beds.

Dr. Jain also calls for far more testing, including of those without symptoms

“The answer is testing, testing, testing… Right now we’re only doing about 500 tests about in a day, which are for people that are symptomatic. We really need to go to maybe 2,000 to 3,000 tests a day. We have the capacity," Jain said.

"Every single successful country and city that has done this has contained the epidemic. You look at Hong Kong, you look at Singapore. You look at any of these states."

"What I’m suggesting is go from 500 tests a day to 3,000 tests a day."

He said first in line for testing should be firefighters, emergency responders and health care workers.

The doctor's comments come as commercial laboratories and University of Tennessee Health Science Center are dramatically ramping up testing capacity.

Investigative reporter Daniel Connolly welcomes tips and comments from the public. Reach him at 529-5296, daniel.connolly@commercialappeal.com, or on Twitter at @danielconnolly.