Here’s the new hospital inside Temple’s arena; Pa. shutdown to remain indefinitely | Morning Newsletter

How long is Pennsylvania’s shutdown of schools and nonessential businesses going to last? As of now, indefinitely, Gov. Tom Wolf said. And his stay-at-home order that now affects 26 counties will remain in place until at least April 30. Also, my colleagues have been tracking the spread of the pandemic in our region since March 6. You can see where the numbers stand for confirmed cases in nine counties in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.

— Josh Rosenblat (@joshrosenblat, morningnewsletter@inquirer.com)

There’s no hardwood, at least not right now. Below the banners touting basketball championships, the floor of the Liacouras Center is lined with hospital cots. This weekend, members of a federal disaster response team set up beds inside Temple’s campus arena, transforming it into a field hospital.

But, officials say they hope the site never has to be used to treat patients. In case a surge of coronavirus cases hits Philadelphia hospitals in the coming weeks, the arena has beds for at least 200 — whether for COVID-19 patients or others needing hospital care is still unclear.

The Liacouras Center was repurposed days after the city said negotiations failed to re-open Hahnemann University Hospital for quarantine space. Mayor Jim Kenney accused site owner Joel Freedman of “trying to make a buck” off the crisis after he said he would rent the building to the city for nearly $1 million a month, causing public backlash including having his Rittenhouse home vandalized.

📸PHOTOS: Here’s what it looks like inside the arena. And, here’s our weekly gallery of how the region is coping with the spread of the coronavirus.

Appointment requests for video “visits” with doctors have exploded in the past week, my colleague Lisa Gartner reports. Patients are trying to seek answers to their coronavirus questions while hoping to avoid places like emergency rooms where they could encounter the virus. And clinicians who can’t be on the front lines, including those who have been exposed to the coronavirus, are still able to help by taking calls.

In the region, Penn Medicine’s virtual service has increased by 10 times while Jefferson’s daily “walk-in” telemedicine jumped from 20 to 200 visits. Their scheduled online appointments ballooned from 50 each to 2,200 and that’s still growing each day.

Like thousands of child-care providers and workers in the region, Mary Graham is teetering. She’s terrified that the day-care center she runs won’t survive the pandemic.

"Nobody is sleeping,” said Graham, the executive director of Children’s Village, which cares for 425 children at Eighth and Arch Streets. “Can we survive a couple of weeks? Yes. But we can’t do this for months. The system couldn’t survive that.”

In Pennsylvania, child-care facilities have been closed since March 16 and New Jersey day cares must close by tomorrow. Enrollment is plunging, and already thin margins are becoming razor-sharp, with many providers saying they couldn’t survive a closure of more than two weeks without significant support. One day-care owner in Northeast Philly laid off 100 people earlier this month.

Whoa, spooky. Thanks for the shot, @matthewscottbarber.

Tag your Instagram posts or tweets with #OurPhilly and we’ll pick our favorite each day to feature in this newsletter and give you a shout out!

“As clinicians, we always focus on the patients in greatest immediate need, which in this current crisis would seem to be COVID patients. But we must not lose sight of the tens of millions of other patients who also need our assistance now.” — writes Pat A. Basu, the president and CEO of Cancer Treatment Centers of America Global Inc., about how specialty hospitals can help handle non-coronavirus patients through partnership.

About 25 neighbors (that doesn’t include their dogs) came outside on the 2200 block of St. James Place in Philly for socially distanced “stoop singing.” My colleague Tom Gralish was there to capture it.

You can watch more of my colleagues’ videos on The Inquirer’s YouTube channel.