China is creating instant hospitals again to deal with its latest increase in patients with COVID-19.
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, the Associated Press reported. Another 3,000-room hospital is under construction in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province.
After largely containing the virus that emerged in the central city of Wuhan in December 2019, China is witnessing a new wave of infections that apparently hopes to worsen. A total of 645 people are currently being treated in Nangong, the state news agency Xinhua said. Clusters of viruses have also been found in Beijing and other provinces.
The speed with which the new hospitals are being built echoes the six-day effort that built several hospitals in Wuhan in January and February.
The government said the most recent cases are spreading with unusual speed and attributed the latest increase to infected people or goods from abroad. “It is more difficult to deal with,” said a government statement, according to The Independent. “Transmission in the community already happened when the epidemic was discovered, so it is difficult to prevent.”
Also on Saturday, the Beijing city government said travelers arriving in the Chinese capital from abroad would be required to undergo an additional week of “medical monitoring” after a 14-day quarantine, but gave no details.
Across the country, the Health Commission reported 130 new cases confirmed within 24 hours until midnight on Friday. He said that 90 of them were in Hebei.