China’s Army med personnel to run new Wuhan hospital starting Monday

WUHAN, Feb 2, 2020, China Daily. Medical personnel from the People’s Liberation Army will take over a newly-constructed hospital in Hubei province’s Wuhan dedicated to novel coronavirus-caused pneumonia, China Daily reported.

A total of 1,400 medical workers from the military will start on Monday receiving and treating patients infected with the highly contagious pneumonia at Huoshenshan Hospital, which was built in nine days and was formally delivered to the military on Sunday morning.

The move was approved by President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

The majority of these medics – 950 – are from hospitals administered by the PLA Joint Logistic Support Force and another 450 are with the PLA Ground Force Medical University, the PLA Navy Medical University and the PLA Air Force Medical University.

Fifteen experts from the PLA Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the PLA Academy of Military Science’s Military Medical Institute will join them to offer professional consultation.

Many medics involved in this operation, the largest mobilization of the PLA’s medical forces since the May 2008 devastating earthquake in Southwest China’s Sichuan province, are experienced in handling infectious diseases because they took part in fights against the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak in China and the Ebola epidemic in some western African nations in 2014.

Construction of Huoshenshan Hospital, inside the Wuhan Workers’ Sanatorium in Caidian district, began on Jan 25 and was done by more than 7,000 workers. At the peak of the massive project, more than 4,000 workers and about 1,000 construction machines and trucks worked on the site.

The facility has 1,000 beds in 419 wards, including 30 intensive care units.

The number of confirmed cases of novel coronavirus rose to 14,380 in the Chinese mainland as of Saturday, including 304 deaths, according to the National Health Commission.

Hubei, the most-affected province in this outbreak, reported 9,074 confirmed cases by the end of the day, including 294 deaths, the provincial health commission said on Sunday morning.