When calamity hits, a state has to take urgent measures. This deadly virus has taken many into its grasp. And the authorities are struggling hard to control the epidemic as well as treat those who have been caught by it. Another announcement followed recently was the construction of a hospital in Wuhan, China, specifically for coronavirus patients, that is aimed to be completed within 6 days.
The hospital shall be having all the necessary arrangements with a capacity of about 1000 beds. Though all the hospitals in the city are taking emergency cases, still, the resources are insufficient and patients have to wait for hours for their turn. A Press release further states, the hospital has to “address the insufficiency of existing medical resources,”
In an interview conducted by BBC, Joan Kaufman, lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, says, “It’s basically a quarantined hospital where they send people with infectious diseases so it has the safety and protective gear in place,”
Videos have been showing the efforts in progress to speed up the construction. The idea of this is not new, as a similar action was taken in Beijing in 2003 when it got struck by the SARS virus. The hospital was successfully built in 7 seven days. The news spread with the hospital being called as a ‘miracle in the history of medicine’
Well, ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’. Manpower of around 4000 was used for quick construction. And it wasn’t just a building, it had all the necessary units that are a part of a standard hospital, like a CT room, an X-ray room, an intensive-care unit, and a laboratory. It had complete facilities available within. And it was considered a world record.
Coming back to this project, the plan includes the construction to be done of prefabricated buildings. Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, says to BBC, “China has a record of getting things done fast even for monumental projects like this. 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.“
Vouching for the capabilities of human resources available in China, he further adds, “The engineering work is what China is good at. They have records of building skyscrapers at speed. This is very hard for westerners to imagine. It can be done,”
