Via the South China Morning Post: China’s race to build temporary hospitals to fight coronavirus ‘too little too late’. Excerpt and then a comment:
As the number of new coronavirus cases continues to jump every day, one measure to cope with the outbreak in the province where it started – building three makeshift hospitals – has been criticised as “too little too late”.
Hundreds of workers were mobilised last week to build the facilities, which are modelled on the Xiaotangshan hospital built in Beijing in 2003 to treat severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) patients.
The temporary hospitals – two in the outbreak epicentre of Wuhan and one in Ezhou, both of which are in Hubei province – are part of efforts to contain the pneumonia-like illness and will provide much-needed hospital beds, where patients can be treated in isolation.
They were expected to be completed in a week to 10 days and live streams from the construction sites in Wuhan have drawn millions of viewers. Other measures include imposing a lockdown on more than a dozen Hubei cities, including Wuhan.
The virus has killed 213 people and sickened more than 9,800 in China so far, with dozens more cases confirmed elsewhere. The World Health Organisation has declared it a global public health emergency.
Chan Wai-keung, a lecturer in social sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said the makeshift facilities in Hubei were not enough.
“Building the Xiaotangshan hospitals now is too little too late,” Chan said. “But it is better than none.”
He said hospitals specialising in infectious diseases should be built in various locations around China so that they are in place before outbreaks happen and can be put into use immediately to treat patients and contain the spread of a virus.
Chan said there were also concerns that the fit-out and equipment at the temporary hospitals could be substandard given the speed at which they were being built.
Surge capacity is almost invariably a problem when an outbreak hits, and understandably.
Governments want the glory of providing good hospitals and staff, but they don't want the hospitals empty and the staff under-employed. So they're built for routine illnesses, and staff keep busy dealing with them.
When something like 2019nCoV arrives, it's usually a public-health Pearl Harbor and the health system takes a brutal beating. One of the worst results is that staff are drafted from other regions and tasks, leaving the routinely ill to their own devices.
That happened in West Africa during the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak, when the healthcare systems were already in terrible shape. Despite the influx of foreign healthcare workers, "ordinary" diseases like malaria actually took a greater combined toll than Ebola did.
The Obama government threw a lot of money into Ebola, and much of it went into building snappy little treatment centres that never saw a patient. I'm not sure they were even repurposed after Ebola was over.
Building surge capacity before the surge is politically difficult. Critics are going to moan about the money wasted on empty, dusty hospitals and expensively trained staff who take off for other countries in search of work and better pay.
So the Hubei clinics may indeed be too little and too late, but no one has the political capital to build them earlier and better. At best, we may learn how to prepare to build extra surge capacity in a hurry. But even that will be a political gamble when even the richest countries have so many demands on their resources.
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