The Koehler Fieldhouse at East Stroudsburg University is being transformed into an alternate care facility for COVID-19 patients.

During a news briefing on Tuesday, Department of Health Secretary Dr. Rachel Levine confirmed that the facility was being established. She said the purpose of the facility is to reduce the number of patients with COVID-19 at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Pocono Campus and St. Luke’s Monroe Campus.

“This is to take care of patients with COVID-19 that are getting better. They are improving, but they are not quite ready to go home yet,” she said. “We’ll be able to decompress the hospitals with those patients.”

Levine said she doesn’t have a specific timeline for when the site will open.

“A lot of that will depend upon how stressed our hospitals are with patients with COVID-19, but we’re getting that care site ready as well as a site in Philadelphia,” she said.

Levine also said during the news briefing that the number of new cases appears to be flattening out.

“I think that the mitigation efforts, the prevention efforts that the governor has put in place have been working. We have been able to flatten the curve in terms of the number of new cases that we are seeing,” she said.

“Last week, we had over 1,900 new cases in a day, and today we have 1,100 new case in a day. It’s still too many. We don’t want that many new cases, but the curve has been flattened significantly.”

As of Tuesday, the state had more than 25,000 cases. If those numbers had risen exponentially as predicted by Federal Emergency Management Association, then the number of cases in the state would have be more than 60,000, she said.

In preparing for a possible swell in the number of cases, Nate Wardle, the press secretary for the state Department of Health, said Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration began working on plans for alternate care sites more than a month ago. The site will only be used if the need arises.

More than 160 cots were delivered to ESU, and the Pennsylvania National Guard began setting them up on Tuesday in the 46,039-square-foot field house, along with privacy screens and other needed equipment.

Ruth Miller, the director of communications for the Office of the State Fire Commissioner, Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, said that not all of the cots would be set up right away. The square footage of the facility plays into the number of cots that can be set up, as well as if the patients have COVID-19 or those without.

The equipment and supplies for the facility come from a Federal Medical Station equipment cache provided by FEMA and the U.S. Health and Human Services, along with equipment and supplies from a state medical equipment cache, Miller said.

If the site is needed, then staffing will be provided through a combination of several sources, including current health care workers from surrounding health care systems, contract medical staff, and personnel from the National Guard and Department of Defense Urban Augmentation Medical Teams, she said. The Department of Health has hired a contractor to oversee the operation of the site and other sites like it.