BEIGIN - Authorities in China have glorified the rush to build two infectious disease hospitals in a matter of days at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak that has now claimed at least 490 lives on the mainland, with live streams showing the construction and the arrival of the first patients at Huoshenshan field hospital in Wuhan on Tuesday.
The 1,000-bed Huoshenshan, or Fire-God Mountain, hospital and the 1,600-bed Leishenshan, or Thunder God Mountain, hospital - which will start taking patients on Thursday - have been the main focus of attention for the country's state-run media, with round-the-clock coverage.
Less known, however, are the other hospitals now under construction elsewhere in the country to address the shortage of beds and facilities needed to treat the outbreak.
Al Jazeera has been able to identify several that have broken ground in the past week as well as many more, from larger 1,000-bed facilities to smaller, 50-bed rural clinics, that are being planned or are already under construction.
"I don't think anyone knows the number, it could be [a lot of these] are either the county level, city level or the district level," Chen Xi, assistant professor of Public Health at Yale School of Medicine told Al Jazeera by phone.
The only other hospital to receive sustained attention from China's official media is a prefabricated isolation facility being built at an emergency hospital in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, which is just north of the major outbreak area of Hubei. There, 542 portable cabins were installed to serve as an isolation ward for coronavirus and will be ready to receive patients by mid-February.
While some have dubbed these other hospitals as local versions of Xiaotangshan, the Beijing hospital famous for treating patients during the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), there appears to be some wariness about reusing that name to avoid sparking panic. (Aljazeera)