nationalpost Construction on the hospitals started Jan. 23 and they are expected to be completed within the first week of February
China is building two hospitals at lightning speed to help treat the thousands in Wuhan infected with the 2019-nCoV coronavirus — and people can watch them being built in real time on the above livestream.
Construction started on Jan. 23 and four companies are working around the clock to build the two structures. The two hospitals will be used to treat the thousands of people at the outbreak’s epicentre, where medical supplies and resources are running scarce.
Huoshenshan Hospital, a 25,000-square-kilometre structure, has its foundation already laid and Leishenshan Hospital was about 40 per cent complete as of Jan. 31, according to the Xinhua news agency.
The hospitals are expected to be operational within the first week of February.
This wouldn’t be the first time China has accomplished such a feat. The designs for the Wuhan hospitals are based on one constructed in Beijing within one week to treat SARS patients in 2003.
Within two months, it treated one-seventh of all the country’s SARS patients, the Changjiang Daily said.
“It created a miracle in the history of medical science,” the paper added.
To save time and money, the hospitals will be built with prefabricated materials, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the BBC.
“China has a record of getting things done fast even for monumental projects like this,” Huang said. “This authoritarian country relies on this top down mobilization approach. They can overcome bureaucratic nature and financial constraints and are able to mobilize all of the resources.”