St. Francis Hospital in Charleston will now be a surge hospital for COVID-19

State officials announced Wednesday that St. Francis Hospital in Charleston will become a surge hospital for the state of West Virginia.

"We're located around other regional hospitals, as well as local nursing homes. It seems like it would be an ideal location for a possible surge site to be," said Thomas Health System CEO Dan Lauffer.

Lauffer said the idea has been discussed for several weeks between the hospital, legislative and state leaders.

"It's part of our mission, it's part of being a faith-based institution," Lauffer said. "We felt that this was something that we needed to do to help our community."

Patients will first go into the former emergency room, which is now St. Francis First, and that is where they will fill out paperwork and be admitted, said Brian Lilly, chief quality officer of Saint Francis.

From there, Lilly said, they will go into an isolated hallway to the west building which is where they will be treated.

"We plan for surges, but we never planned to take half the hospital and set it up as a surge," Lilly told WSAZ.

He said the beds will fill two floors of the west building and be entirely dedicated to COVID-19 patients if needed.

"With it being a pandemic, it's hard to tell exactly how many patients we'll receive or if we'll receive any patients at all," Lauffer said.

The hospital has moved two full units into another part of the facility and converted offices spaces into hospital rooms to prepare.

"After we hit the 36 mark, then we're going to open up some more available beds and we'll be able to receive more patients until we get up to the 96 beds," Lilly said.

Officials told WSAZ that the first 30 beds will be available and ready to go for patients on Friday.