China Says It’s Building Two Hospitals In Wuhan To Fight Coronavirus

Chinese officials announced plans Saturday to build a second hospital in Wuhan within days to fight a coronavirus that originated in the central city.

The government said Friday it would finish constructing a prefabricated, 1,000-bed hospital on Feb. 3. The second hospital to treat victims will have 1,300 beds and be ready in 15 days, The New York Times reported.

“It’s still too early to draw conclusions about how severe the virus is because at the beginning of any outbreak you would focus more on the severe cases,” Tarik Jasarevic, a spokesman for the World Health Organization in Geneva, said, according to The Associated Press.

More than 1,400 people are infected with the virus and 42 have died since the outbreak started in December 2019, Chinese officials said.

Some workers at the first new hospital site are volunteers. (RELATED: CDC Confirms Wuhan Coronavirus Case In Chicago As China Locks Down Travel In More Cities)

“It’s basically a quarantined hospital where they send people with infectious diseases so it has the safety and protective gear in place,” Joan Kaufman, a lecturer in global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, said, according to BBC News.

China has restricted travel in over a dozen cities and will suspend tours for citizens traveling abroad starting Monday.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.