China has built a 1,500-room hospital for COVID-19 patients to fight a surge in infections that the government says are more difficult to contain and that it blames infected people or goods from abroad
BEIJING – China on Saturday completed the construction of a 1,500-room hospital for COVID-19 patients to fight a surge in infections that the government says are more difficult to contain and that it infects people or goods from abroad. give guilt.
The hospital is one of six with a total of 6,500 rooms being built in Nangong, south of Beijing, in Hebei Province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
A total of 645 people are being treated in Nangong and the Hebei provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, Xinhua said. A 3,000-room hospital is under construction in Shijiazhuang.
Virus clusters were also found in Beijing and the provinces of Heilongjiang and Liaoning in the northeast and Sichuan in the southwest.
The latest infections are spreading extremely fast, the National Health Commission said.
“It’s harder to deal with,” the commission said in a statement. “Community transmission already took place when the epidemic was found, so it’s hard to prevent.”
The Commission blames the latest cases on people or goods arriving from abroad. It blamed “abnormal management” and “inadequate protection of workers” involved in imports, but gave no details.
“They are all imported from abroad. “It was caused by access personnel or contaminated goods imported with cold chain,” reads the statement.
The Chinese government has suggested that the disease may have originated abroad and announced the release of the virus on imported food, mostly frozen fish, although foreign scientists are skeptical.
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.
On Saturday, the Hebei government has reported 32 additional cases since midnight, reports The Shanghai.
In Shijiazhuang, authorities have completed the construction of 1,000 rooms of the planned hospital, state TV said on Saturday. Xinhua said all the facilities should be completed within a week.
At the beginning of the outbreak last year in Wuhan, a similar program for rapid hospital construction was launched by the ruling Communist Party.
More than ten million people in Shijiazhuang underwent virus tests late Friday, Xinhua said, referring to a deputy mayor, Meng Xianghong. It is said that 247 locally transmitted cases were found.
Meanwhile, researchers sent by the World Health Organization in Wuhan were preparing to investigate the origin of the virus. The team, which arrived on Thursday, was under a two-week quarantine but had to liaise with Chinese experts via video link.
The arrival of the team was held for months by diplomatic disputes that caused a rare public complaint from the head of the WHO.
The delay, and the secret ruling party’s order to scientists not to speak publicly about the disease, have raised questions about whether Beijing could block discoveries that would harm its self-declared status as a leader in the antivirus battle.