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China-style makeshift hospitals could help coronavirus-hit countries, expert says
- Advocate of the facilities in Wuhan suggests that home isolation of mild cases puts families at risk
- Big buildings such as convention centres should be designed to be easily converted into temporary medical centres, Wang Chen says
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Countries battling the coronavirus pandemic should seriously consider building temporary hospitals, according to a Chinese doctor who promoted the idea for Wuhan, the central Chinese city that was overwhelmed by cases when the pathogen first emerged.
The suggestion from Wang Chen, a respiratory diseases expert and vice-president of Chinese Academy of Engineering, was published in The Lancet medical journal on Thursday.
Wang said he arrived in Wuhan on February 1 to find that many patients with mild symptoms and suspected cases had not been admitted to hospital and so threatened to infect others. Two days later, he proposed turning stadiums, hotels and convention centres in the city into makeshift hospitals called fangcang , a word that has a similar meaning to Noah’s ark.
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In all, 16 of the hospitals were established in Wuhan, allowing medical personnel to isolate and treat 12,000 patients with mild to moderate symptoms between February 5 and March 10, the day when the last fangcang facility was closed.
The recommendation came as the number of infected people around the world surpassed 1 million, with about a quarter of the cases in the United States. More than 6,000 people in the US have died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
Tent wards have been set up in Central Park in New York, the epicentre of the US outbreak, and other makeshift hospitals are being erected in convention centres, tennis courts and university dormitories as New York state braces for a peak in cases in coming weeks.
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