The new hospital in Wuhan is not exactly what it seems

This photo, taken from BBC News, could not have been taken anywhere in the world that is not China.

In China, specifically in Wuhan, where there is the epidemic everyone is talking about, they will build this hospital in a short time. It will be operational from February 3rd. Some points to clarify:

• The hospital will not be built from scratch, but with prefabs
• The food and medicine supply system, extremely rooted in China, will make it possible to allocate stocks in record time
• The staff for the hospital will be taken from other centers, for now there will be 150 people
• The government finances directly most of the costs of these constructions.

Then you will say: “Cool, maybe it was like this here too!”, “Here in Italy it takes us years to do things!”

Well, as always, not all that glitters is gold: the reason why this hospital is under construction is that today the existing hospitals in the city of Wuhan (which are already 20), are flooded with people who even stand 10 hours waiting before being visited. They will probably die sooner.

The more people are around and are potentially contagious, the more the virus has a chance to expand. China has a huge gap to fill with the outside world after the SARS epidemic in 2003 which was handled very badly.

Building one or two hospitals, unfortunately, is a very small action. Just in the city of Wuhan there are 12 million inhabitants, and 20 hospitals are nothing. The entire isolated area to date includes 56 million people, practically the Italian population. And to contain a pandemic in Italy do we make just one hospital? Two? Hundreds of emergency centers are needed, not two more.

This action is a move to improve the perception of the management of this problem.

And basically the cause of all this virus, but also of SARS, is always due to the poor hygienic conditions indicated by Chinese cuisine (I saw photos of people eating raw bats and snakes, just saying).

So OK they are good at making a hospital in 10 days, but it is as if we Italians put 50 of us to fix a small house that fell due to an earthquake.