China is once again throwing up immediate hospitals to deal with the latest surge of COVID-19 patients.
A 1,500-room hospital to treat people with the coronavirus was completed on Saturday after just five days of construction. The hospital is one of six with a total of 6,500 rooms being built in Nangong, south of Beijing, in Hebei Province, reports The Associated Press. Another 3,000-room hospital is under construction in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province.
After China largely contained the virus that originated in the central city of Wuhan in December 2019, China is seeing a new wave of infections that are apparently going to get worse. A total of 645 people are currently being treated in Nangong, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said. Virus clusters have also been found in Beijing and other provinces.
The speed with which the new hospitals are being built reflects the six-day effort that several hospitals in Wuhan built in January and February last year.
The government has said the latest cases are spreading unusually fast and blaming the latest increase in infected people or goods from abroad. “It’s harder to deal with,” The Independent said in a statement. “Community transmission already took place when the epidemic was found, so it’s hard to prevent.”
The Beijing city government also said on Saturday that travelers arriving in the Chinese capital from abroad would have to undergo an additional week of “medical monitoring” after a 14-day quarantine, but gave no details.
Nationwide, the health commission reported 130 new confirmed cases in the 24 hours to midnight. It was said that 90 of them were in Hebei.