Nova Scotia Company Creating Pandemic-Fighting Screening Booths
HALIFAX — As work in its industry dries up, a Nova Scotia company is shifting gears to lend its expertise to the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beaumont & Co. is a local company, run by brothers Sean and James Court, that designs and manufactures elaborate trade show booths for companies attending global conferences.
But as Sean Court explains, large, international trade shows were one of the first industries hit hard by the global COVID-19 pandemic.
“If you have people flying in from 100 different countries that’s a disaster waiting to happen, right?” he says.
That’s why these days, instead of creating some big brand’s next trade show display, Beaumont is designing temporary screening booths and hospital rooms for use during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Court explains, the gap between trade show booths and temporary medical structures isn’t that large.
One thing the trade show industry prizes, he explains, is temporary structures you can set up easily and in a hurry.
“They want really quick-building, modular, rapidly deploying structures,” Court says.
Big-time trade show booths are also massive. Court says they can be as large as 2,000 square feet and feel more like temporary halls than product displays.
Sean and James were thinking about all this as their trade show work began to dry up. They quickly realized it would only take a few changes to shift their focus from marketing to medical.
“We have this material that’s perfect, you know: it’s fast-building, it’s tool-less, it’s modular, and all we need to do is put medical-grade substrate on it, and all of the sudden you can easily build temporary hospital rooms, for example,” Court says.
So that’s what they got to work designing.
Since they started, Court says they’ve designed and prototyped screening booths and rooms for hospitals and testing sites that can keep front-line workers safe.
These booths can be set up in about 30 minutes.
They’ve also designed larger-scale structures and dividers that could, for example, turn a gymnasium into a temporary hospital. The trade-show technology they use would allow something like that to be set up in hours instead of days.
Court says Beaumont is already talking with different levels of government throughout Canada about supplying them with emergency medical structures, should the need arise.
He says the process is a strange change of pace for a company used to working with organizations that have very different priorities.
“It’s kind of a rush, in a serious way… the most common question we’re getting is how quick can you ship it out, how quick can it be installed?” he says.
“It’s not like when you’re working with someone in a creative field when they say, ‘oh yeah that looks nice, my event’s in three months,’ it’s ‘this is going to be the right solution to keep people safe, and we need it in days.’ ”
Court says it’s a good feeling knowing they’re there to help in dire circumstances but says “the really odd part” is creating something they hope they never actually have to sell.
“It’s one of those unique things because I hope, of course, our services aren’t needed. But if they are, we’ll be here.”