Wuhan, the epicentre of the raging coronavirus epidemic, is rushing to build a new 1,000-bed hospital to treat patients, mobilizing machinery to get it ready by early next week, state media said.

The Wuhan government said it was building a designated hospital with space for 1,000 beds in the style of a facility that Beijing constructed during the SARS epidemic. The hospital will be erected on a 25,000 square-meter lot and is slated for completion February 3, municipal authorities said.

The new hospital is being built around a holiday complex originally intended for local workers, set in gardens by a lake on the outskirts of the city, the official Changjiang Daily reported today. Prefabricated buildings, which will have 1,000 beds, will be put up, it said.

Building machinery, including 35 diggers and 10 bulldozers, arrived at the site on Thursday night, with the aim to get the new facility ready by Monday, the paper added.

“The construction of this project is to solve the shortage of existing medical resources,” the report said. “Because it will be prefabricated buildings, it will not only be built fast but it also won’t cost much.”

China State Construction Engineering, one of the companies building the hospital, said today it was “doing all it can and would overcome difficulties” to play its part, adding it now had more than 100 workers on the site.

Images on state television showed a flurry of activity at the muddy building site with dozens of diggers painted in multiple colors hard at work preparing the ground, as a stream of trucks ferried in materials and equipment.

The hospital aims to copy the experience of Beijing in 2003, when the city battled Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). As many as 774 people died globally in the SARS epidemic, which reached nearly 30 countries.

At the time, Beijing built the Xiaotangshan hospital in its northern suburbs in just a week. Within two months, it treated one-seventh of all the country’s SARS patients, the Changjiang Daily said.-Reuters/AP

The Xiaotangshan hospital complex was a temporary medical center built in 2003 in northern Beijing suburb to treat SARS patients.

Rush to build 1,000-bed hospital in desperate attempt to rein in virus