Coronavirus: China Builds 19 ‘Makeshift Hospitals’ in Northern Province

Chinese Communist Party authorities have ordered local officials in China’s northeastern Jilin province, which borders North Korea and Russia, to build nearly two dozen “makeshift hospitals” over the past month to help address Jilin’s exploding Chinese coronavirus caseload, the state-run Global Times reported on Monday.

“Jilin Province has built 19 makeshift hospitals in a bid to admit surging COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] patients as of Monday,” the newspaper reported on March 28.

Jilin’s “makeshift hospitals” have also been referred to as “temporary hospitals” and “quarantine centers” by other Chinese state media outlets in recent days.

Xinhua, China’s official state press agency, reported on March 14 that construction had begun a day earlier on a “quarantine center in Jilin.”

“Covering an area of about 430,000 square meters, the project is designed with 6,000 quarantine rooms,” Xinhua detailed.

The news agency’s report included several photos of the medical facility’s building site taken on March 13 in Jilin city, which is the second-largest city in Jilin province. The images appeared to show Chinese state laborers breaking ground on the project.

Jilin’s provincial government announced on March 15 that it had opened six “temporary hospitals” earlier that same day.

“Five hospitals are in Jilin City, the area most impacted [by the Chinese coronavirus epidemic], and one has been built in the provincial capital of Changchun,” Zhang Li, the deputy director of Jilin’s provincial health commission, told Xinhua at the time.

“Along with seven medical institutions vacated for the resurgence, there are over 20,000 beds available for COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] cases in the province,” the state news agency revealed.

Chinese Communist Party Vice Premier Sun Chunlan referred to Jilin’s “makeshift hospitals” on March 25 in a stern edict demanding local Party officials enforce “stringent measures” on the province’s populace to curb viral transmission.

“High-quality screening should be conducted on a daily basis, and all those who test positive should be sent immediately to designated or temporary hospitals,” Sun said.

The Communist Party leader’s statement suggested Jilin residents, most of whom were already under strict lockdown orders, were being forcibly shipped to state-run quarantine facilities if they tested positive for the Chinese coronavirus.

Elsewhere in her March 25 statement, Sun described Jilin province’s epidemic situation as “arduous” and in need of “a more swift response” by local health officials.

“Work is needed,” Sun acknowledged of Jilin’s coronavirus protocol.

The notice marked a rare admission of poor performance by a top-ranking Chinese Communist Party official. Jilin governmental authorities have seemingly failed to contain the province’s latest epidemic of the Chinese coronavirus since it began earlier this month, allowing it to mushroom into a public health crisis requiring federal-level reinforcement.

The Chinese Communist Party “disciplined” 16 local Party officials in Jilin province “for their inadequate epidemic prevention efforts” on March 17, according to Xinhua.

“Some of the officials, including the head of the municipal health commission in Changchun, the provincial capital, were removed from their posts, while the others received punishments,” the Chinese state press agency revealed.

Jilin province documented “1,086 confirmed [symptomatic] cases and 907 asymptomatic cases” on March 28, according to the Global Times. This figure was nearly the same as the province’s daily Chinese coronavirus caseload on March 15 (1,456), indicating Jilin’s epidemic of the disease has yet to level off.