China announced Friday that it is swiftly building a 1,000-bed hospital dedicated to patients infected with a new virus that has killed 26 people, sickened hundreds and prompted unprecedented lockdowns of cities during the country’s most important holiday.
On the eve of the Lunar New Year, transportation was shut down in at least 13 cities that are home to more than 36 million people. The cities are Wuhan, where the illness has been concentrated, and 12 of its neighbors in central China’s Hubei province.

“To address the insufficiency of existing medical resources,” Wuhan is constructing a hospital modeled after the Xiaotangshan SARS hospital in Beijing, Wuhan authorities said in a Friday notice. The facility will be a prefabricated structure on a 270,000-square-foot lot, slated for completion Feb. 3.

Construction of the special hospital with a capacity of 1,000 beds for patients with #nCoV2019 has begun in Wuhan, according to the model of the hospital built in seven days in Beijing to deal with #SARS in 2003. The construction is scheduled to be completed by February 3. pic.twitter.com/MtVgIG0liC

— People’s Daily, China (@PDChina) January 24, 2020

The SARS hospital was built from scratch in 2003 in just six days to treat an outbreak of a similar respiratory virus that had spread from China to more than a dozen countries and killed about 800 people. The hospital featured individual isolation units that looked like rows of tiny cabins.

source latimes.com