BEIJING (AP) – China on Saturday completed construction of a 1,500-room hospital for COVID-19 patients to combat a wave of infections that the government says are more difficult to control and that it has been blamed on infected people or goods from abroad.
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.
China had largely kept the coronavirus first discovered in the central city of Wuhan under control in late 2019, but has seen a spate of cases since December.
Nangong and Hebei’s provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, treat a total of 645 people, Xinhua said. In Shijiazhuang, a hospital with 3,000 rooms is in progress.
Virus clusters have also been found in Beijing and Heilongjiang and Liaoning provinces to the northeast and Sichuan to the southwest.
The latest infections are spreading unusually quickly, the National Health Commission said.
“It is more difficult to handle,” said a Commission statement. “Transfer to the community has already occurred when the epidemic was discovered, so it is difficult to prevent.”
The Commission blamed the latter cases on people or goods coming from abroad. It blamed “abnormal management” and “insufficient protection of workers” involved in the imports, but did not provide details.
“They are all imported from abroad. It was caused by access personnel or contaminated imported goods in the cold chain, ”the statement said.
The Chinese government has suggested that the disease may have originated abroad and published the virus’s discovery on imported food, mostly frozen fish, although foreign scientists are skeptical.
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.
On Saturday, the Hebei government reported an additional 32 cases since midnight, The Paper in Shanghai reported.
In Shijiazhuang, authorities have completed construction of 1,000 rooms of the planned hospital, state television said Saturday. Xinhua said all facilities should be ready within a week.
At the start of last year’s outbreak in Wuhan, a similar rapid hospital construction program was launched by the ruling Communist Party.
More than 10 million people in Shijiazhuang underwent virus testing late Friday, Xinhua said, citing a deputy mayor, Meng Xianghong. It said 247 locally transmitted cases have been found.
Meanwhile, researchers sent by the World Health Organization to Wuhan were preparing to investigate the origin of the virus. The team, which arrived Thursday, was under a two-week quarantine but was said to be talking to Chinese experts via video link.
The team’s arrival was delayed for months by diplomatic bickering that led to a rare public complaint from the WHO head.
That delay and the covert ruling party’s order for scientists not to speak publicly about the disease have raised questions about whether Beijing could try to block discoveries that would hurt its self-proclaimed status as a leader in the anti-virus battle.