As warehouses sit idle and skilled managers finish yet another puzzle on their dining room tables, Hospitality + Events Fight Back-20 is fervently working on amplifying the voice and abilities of the hospitality and event businesses. As an industry of inclusion and action, hospitality and event professionals are not the type to sit idle, awaiting a handout. We want to help.

Coronavirus, COVID-19 continues rolling through our economy and our lives with unpredictable consequences. One thing we know, collectively, is that it will take a unified effort to stay healthy, physically, mentally and financially. Our industry has resources. Unused ballroom space, tents, tables, chairs, trucks, A/V equipment, operations specialists, customer services professionals, you name it, we’ve got it and can deploy it anywhere in the world. How do we know? Because, we’ve been doing it for decades and doing it well.

HEFB-20 aligns the incredible resources of our industry with hotels, city, state and local governments to establish Alternative Care Facilities. This is a COVID-19 response plan that speaks to what the hospitality and events industry does best: builds structures, transforms spaces, and serves others. In an article published on April 7, 2020, Johns Hopkins recommended that all cities and towns begin the process of establishing plans for ACFs in their area to augment surge capacity for COVID-19.

ACFs have been proposed to serve a variety of functions, including:

• Overflow from hospitals, providing a full range of care
• Patient isolation and alternative to home care for COVID-19–infected patients
• Testing centers for active infections and antibody testing
• Quarantine of contacts of confirmed cases
• Primary triage and rapid patient screening
• Limited supportive care for noncritical infected patients
• Care for recovering, non-infected patients

HEFB-20 is looking for suppliers who can offer logistics support and resources for:

• Converting hotels/events spaces into hospitals or treatment facilities
• Hotels for hospital workers that can’t go home to their families
• Quarantine facilities for roommates of people who tested positive for the coronavirus
• Hotels as shelter space to keep people off streets and protect people in unsafe homes
• Construction of any other temporary structure needed to support COVID relief efforts

Hello! Destination Management is proud to be a partner with HEFB-20 and to assist in this very important mission. With direct contact to literally hundreds of vetted suppliers across Hello!’s eleven locations in the United States, Hello! is poised to assist in putting the industry to work on one of the biggest events the world has ever seen. We’d encourage others to engage and be part of the collective solution by signing up to provide paid services or to request support at www.hefb.org!