News From CNN’s Nadine Schmidt in Berlin
Germany’s largest football stadium — the Westfalen stadium — will be a coronavirus treatment center starting tomorrow, the Borussia Dortmund football team confirmed in a statement.
“Starting tomorrow, Saturday, the focus in the area of the north stand of SIGNAL IDUNA PARK will not be on football, but on the treatment of suspected cases of coronavirus and patients with corresponding symptoms,” the statement said.
Dortmund managing directors Hans-Joachim Watzke and Carsten Cramer said the facility is an “ideal place to actively help people.”
“Our stadium is the figurehead of the city, a fixed point for almost everyone in Dortmund and the surrounding area and, thanks to its technical, infrastructural and spatial conditions, is the ideal place to actively help people who are potentially infected by the coronavirus or who complain about corresponding symptoms such as respiratory diseases and fever,” they said in the statement.
They said it is “our duty and our desire” to do everything possible to help.
The club said it transformed the stadium in conjunction with the local health care service in North Rhine-Westphalia.
