Chinese start building 1,000-bed hospital — to be ready in 10 days

A VAST hospital with beds for 1,000 patients is being built from scratch in a desperate attempt to cope with the coronavirus outbreak – and it’s scheduled to be completed in just ten days.

Extraordinary footage showed a flurry of activity on the reddish dirt as 50 diggers, bulldozers and dumper trucks cleared the 270,000 sq ft building site.

The hospital in Wuhan, the city where the virus spread from, will be made of prefabricated buildings and is due to be named Mountain Of The Fire God.

The building work continued as swathes of China were shut down last night, including sections of the Great Wall. More and more cities were effectively forced to close.

Other major tourist sites including the Forbidden City in Beijing and Shanghai’s Disney resort are set to shut while public events to mark the Chinese Lunar New Year were cancelled.

The death toll in China rose to 26, with more than 800 infected worldwide.

Officials hope the huge engineering effort will see the Wuhan hospital finished before its estimated completion date on February 3. Draft plans show it is made up of more than 20 prefabricated blocks.

The building is modelled on a hospital in Beijing that was constructed in just seven days by 7,000 workers to deal with the spread of the Sars virus in 2013. The facility, which had 1,000 beds and was operated by the military, treated around 15 per cent of China’s Sars patients in two months.

Hundreds of workers are reportedly being paid up to £132-a-day to build the new hospital – three times their usual wage.

China State Construction Engineering said it was ‘doing all it can and would overcome difficulties’. The construction was ordered as hospitals in Wuhan issued pleas for masks and protective suits, and raised fears over shortages of testing equipment.

One manufacturing company claimed that its staff were working triple shifts to produce tens of thousands of kits.

The availability of supplies could be hit as businesses are due to close down today for the week-long new year celebrations.

Images on social media showed huge queues at hospitals and clinics.

Last night, the first two deaths were reported outside the central Hubei province, where the outbreak is believed to have started at a food market. Health officials said an 80-year-old man died in Hebei, bordering Beijing, after returning from a stay in Wuhan. Another victim died in north-east Heilongjiang province, which borders Russia and is more than 1,200 miles from Wuhan.

Wuhan, which covers an area five times the size of Greater London, has been on lockdown since Thursday. Streets are deserted and public transport has been suspended.

Residents are advised not to leave and there are military checkpoints on roads.

Trucks with food and supplies were allowed in after fights broke out in shops.

The World Health Organisation has called the coronavirus an ‘emergency in China’ but stopped short of declaring it of international concern.

‘Closed sections of the Great Wall’