China is attempting to swiftly build 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 multiple cities during the country’s most important holiday.
On the eve of the Lunar New Year, transportation was shut down Friday in at least 10 cities, with a total of about 33 million people. The cities are Wuhan, where the illness has been concentrated, and nine of its neighbors in central China’s Hubei province.
“To address the insufficiency of existing medical resources,” Wuhan authorities said in a Friday notice, the city is constructing a hospital modeled after the Xiaotangshan SARS hospital in Beijing. The facility will be a prefabricated structure on a 25,000-square-meter [270,000-square-foot] lot, slated for completion Feb. 3.
