SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. — As coronavirus cases continue to increase, local hospitals are bracing for more and more patients. One Seminole County company has developed a mobile ICU it believes can help hospitals across the country meet the demand of an expected overflow of patients.

World Housing Solution in Sanford showed Spectrum News 13 what the inside of the units look like.


Charter Communications has temporarily opened its live stream free to the public. You can watch Spectrum News via our live stream on your desktop or laptop without a subscription by visiting our website and clicking “Watch Live” in the upper right. Charter also is temporarily offering free broadband and wifi access for 60 days to teachers and families with K-12 or college students. To enroll, call 1-844-488-8395. The company also will open more than half a million wifi hotspots across the country.


They are based off the main framework the company uses to build mobile units, like the ones they used in Puerto Rico for extra housing after Hurricane Maria. 

However, this version the company developed has all the major components of a typical hospital intensive care unit, where so many of the patients suffering from the worst of COVID-19 are having to get treatment.

An ICU doctor out of north Florida says she has treated patients in tents like the ones popping up in places like New York City.  She says the mobile units are much better-equipped to handle critical coronavirus patients than the tents are.

“Dirt is tracking in and out (of the tents). There’s not a good environmental seal and power is woefully inadequate,” said Stephanie Hollis, an ICU anesthesiologist.

“Power is the thing everybody tends to think of last and they think, ‘I’ll just put a generator out there’, but a generator is a dirty power and it’s unreliable,” she added.

World Housing Solution stated the mobile ICU structures have a much-more reliable power source because they use a hybrid power system instead of generators.

The company’s President and CEO Ron Ben-Zeev says his company has not distributed any of the mobile ICUs to anyone yet. 

But Ben-Zeev says he has introduced the concept to hospitals across the country and even people within the federal government, and he says there is definitely interest in them as the healthcare field faces daunting numbers of coronavirus patients in the weeks to come.​