China is again throwing immediate hospitals to accommodate the latest wave of COVID-19 patients.
A hospital with 1,500 rooms to treat people with the coronavirus was ready 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 suppressing the virus that emerged in the central city of Wuhan in December 2019, China is seeing a new wave of infections that it apparently expects will 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 at which the new hospitals are being built reflects the six-day effort that built several hospitals in Wuhan in January and February.
The government said the latest cases are spreading unusually quickly, blaming infected people or goods from abroad. “It’s harder to handle,” said a government statement, The Independent. “Transfer to the community has already occurred when the epidemic was discovered, so it is difficult to prevent.”
Also on Saturday, Beijing city authorities said travelers arriving in the Chinese capital from abroad should undergo an additional week of “medical surveillance” after a 14-day quarantine, but did not provide details.
Across the country, the Health Commission reported 130 new confirmed cases in the 24 hours to midnight on Friday. It said 90 of them were in Hebei.