As he walked along the rows of makeshift hospital cubbies at the TCF Regional Care Center Friday morning, Dr. David Strong kept asking the same questions of the coronavirus patients admitted to the field hospital.

"How are things going? Are you comfortable? Have you been able to talk to family? Are you warm enough? Are the lights dim enough at night to sleep?" asked Strong, an emergency room doctor at Henry Ford Health System who has been temporarily reassigned as the chief medical officer at TCF.

Universally, he said, people told him there wasn't anything else they needed at the large hulking field hospital that, in its normal existence, was a huge hulking convention center, chilly and impersonal with concrete floors and impossibly high ceilings.

All the hospital cubbies — made from metal frames and white plastic walls — were the same: bed, chair, bedside table, reading lamp, overhead lights and copper tubing that delivers the oxygen that patients need.

It's in no way a typical hospital environment inside Hall C at the former Cobo Convention Center. But it is a spot that has become necessary to help treat a surge of coronavirus patients in southeast Michigan hospitals.

As of Friday afternoon, 21 patients were being treated at the field hospital, most of them elderly residents of long-term care facilities, such as nursing homes or assisted living residences. They're not sick enough to be on ventilators or require intensive care, but they can't go back to their homes until they get a negative COVID-19 test.

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"As I did my rounds, I found there are a few patients who have family situations that prevent them from going home yet," Strong said. "One man said his wife has a lot of her own medical issues and he didn't want to go home and get her sick."

The new focus of the patient population has caused a few tweaks at the TCF Center. Because many of the patients have a harder time eating solid food, Henry Ford Health System has taken over providing meals for the facility from the TCF kitchen crews in order to accommodate the need for feeding tubes and pureed food, as well as patients who can eat regular meals.

The staffing needs also have changed, Strong said, and are more focused on nursing care to help patients who are less mobile and need help getting to the bathrooms or be moved within their beds to prevent bedsores.

"Our focus is not to have critical patients who need a lot of physical care, but more nursing care, because many of these are nursing home patients," he said. "We do have some patients who are otherwise fairly mobile and they’re going through that recovery process. But they still feel short of breath when they walk, so we have physical and occupational therapy for them, too."

The patients can bring in their own phones, laptops and notebooks so they can connect with family. And for those who don't have those devices, TCF has cell phones and charging cords that the patients can use.

"So I tell them, write down your wife's number," Strong said. "You know, we all have our numbers programmed into our phones and haven't memorized all those numbers."

Since opening for business a week ago, after an 11-day build-out by TCF crews and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, TCF has far fewer patients than anticipated. It was set up to accommodate up to 250 coronavirus patients by Friday, but there were less than two dozen in the field hospital Friday morning.

Strong said he doesn't think TCF will reach capacity.

"At this point, I don’t anticipate we’re going to fill up unless we stop observing social distancing," he said. "I don’t think we’ll get to full capacity, and hopefully, this will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience."

The patients at TCF aren't the sickest patients, either. The criteria to get into TCF is a person who has had symptoms for at least 10 days and been hospitalized for at least 48 hours. This gives health care professionals the time they need to determine whether the patient needs intensive care, including a ventilator, which is only available in existing hospitals, not at the field hospitals.

Another field hospital at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi is close to complete with a scaled-back capacity of 250 beds instead of the initial estimate of 1,000 beds. That facility is expected to be ready to accept patients on Monday. The lease cost to rent the two convention centers through Sept. 30 is roughly $8.2 million each, although additional costs for the actual care of patients isn't available yet.

For Strong, the 12-14-hour days at TCF have been worth it, even though he has to throw his clothes in the washer as soon as he gets home and run upstairs to take a shower before he can give his wife and two kids a kiss.

"I’m an ER doc and I also have some specialty training in disaster response and mass casualty. But doing it in real life is nothing like what you read about in the books," he said. "It’s been so inspiring to see how everyone really does show up to support you. We have people coming from all different sorts of places, the military and different (federal, state and local) governments, and trying to figure out how to make them all work ... We're just all here to make sure this works."

As for the patients, after they tell him that they're comfortable and don't need anything at the moment, Strong said he tries to go a little deeper.

"When I’ve really gotten people to answer the question, it’s the same thing that everyone wants and that’s for things to get back to normal," he said. "They tell me 'I want to be able to go home and not worry that I’ll make them sick. I want to sleep with my own bed.'

"And no one has asked me for a television yet."

Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.