With the rise in the outbreak and limited medical facilities, China aimed to build a hospital dedicated to Coronavirus patients. The work started on January 23, and finally got completed on Sunday. The entire workforce for the urgent construction was up to 7000.
The hospital holds a capacity of 1000 beds and is spread over an area of 25,000 square meters. The hospital shall be handed over to medical staff from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
The Huoshenshan Hospital is structured on the idea similar to the hospital built in Beijing in 7 days to overcome the SARS epidemic.
The hospital was expected to take patients Monday onwards. The entire project got completed in 10 days.
The total cases have crossed 17,000 overall with around 250 death cases within China and one confirmed in the Philippines. There is a dire need for urgent medical facilities to be provided to the patients. Doctors and researchers are working on vaccines and treatments. Australia has created the first lab-created coronavirus to facilitate medication. China’s lab has also introduced a test that diagnoses the virus in less than 15 minutes. Strict screenings are being carried out in all cross at all ports and land crossings. Furthermore, another emergency hospital, Leishenshan Hospital, is under construction, 25 miles from Huoshenshan Hospital. The latter one will accommodate 1600 beds and shall be hopefully operational from Wednesday.
Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, Joan Kaufman says, “It’s basically a quarantined hospital where they send people with infectious diseases so it has the safety and protective gear in place,”
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations says, “China has a record of getting things done fast even for monumental projects like this,”
The hospital was planned to be built from prefabricated buildings. “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.”
The laborers and engineers were hired from around the country, gathering maximum potential to break the record that Beijing made. The machinery and medical resources were planned to be borrowed from other hospitals if required on an urgent basis, or else, ordered directly from factories and production houses.
Further adding, Huang said, “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,”
The hospital is equipped with all necessary facilities, including X-ray and CT room, intensive care units and laboratories.
