Within less than 10 hours, a team of senior designers and architects in Shanghai finished plans for Wuhan's largest "cabin" hospital for coronavirus patients.

Construction has started on the largest "cabin" hospital in central China's Wuhan city. The facility was designed by an institute in Shanghai within just 10 hours.



The Changjiangxincheng District Cabin Hospital, now being built in the Hongqiao Group Industrial Park of Wuhan, will feature 20 mobile cabins and contain over 3,000 beds to treat novel coronavirus patients with mild symptoms.

Construction started on February 15 and is scheduled to be completed on Tuesday.

To meet the demanding schedule, Shanghai Municipal Engineering Design Institute (Group) Co finished the design in only 9 hours and 42 minutes.

The institute received the urgent task from the construction and investment group of Changjiangxincheng District at 8pm on February 14, which required a finished design before 6am on the next day, according to the institute.

It soon organized a design team of 44 senior architects and civil engineers. The team started designing at 10:30pm.

The blueprint was optimized based on newly released makeshift hospital standards in Wuhan. The designers made some modifications to ensure both schedule and safety, the institute said.

They called several of the institute's most experienced chief engineers after midnight to help solve various challenges.



They reevaluated the design at 4:15am and completed the task on time at 6am.

"No one felt tired after working overnight," said Liu Jun, head of the design team. "Not a single second can be wasted during the race against the virus," he added.

The blueprint was then sent to Li Wei and Zhu Wei, two engineers with the Wuhan branch of the institute. They rushed to the site to guide construction. Designers in Shanghai are also offering assistance through video conference around the clock.

The first batch of trucks entered the site at 8am on February 15, marking the beginning of construction for the hospital.

The cabin hospital, mainly renovated from the large warehouses in the industrial park, features large greenery coverage and is away from the noisy traffic.



Wuhan has built 11 temporary cabin hospitals at convention centers, stadiums and universities to treat infected patients with mild symptoms. They can offer a total of 20,461 beds to relieve a shortage of medical beds in the city.