TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Video has surfaced allegedly shot from inside the instant "hospital" hastily constructed in Wuhan appearing much more like a prison than a center to care for sick patients.
On Monday (Feb. 3), Communist China claimed to have completed the Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan to house 1,000 of the city's residents infected with the novel coronavirus (2019nCoV). The rapid construction of the hospital was widely trumpeted by Chinese state-run mouthpieces and parroted by Western media outlets as an example of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP's) superior ability to quickly respond to crises, while a de-emphasis was placed on the initial slow response that arguably allowed the virus to mushroom out of control.
However, the dissident organization Himalaya Global released a video on its Twitter page Monday which was apparently secretly filmed by a Chinese contractor inside the new facility. The video starts with the contractor introducing the Spartan interior of Ward 1.
The man starts out by ominously saying, "Once you are in, you can't get out." He then asserts that patients would be better off staying at home than checking into the new compound.
The camera then focuses on the tiny windows that he said would be used to serve food to patients. In the background, another man can be heard saying that "the dead will be removed from that door."
Incredibly, it is clear that each room has a small window with distinct vertical prison bars. The contractor says that those who do not recover "will be sent to the crematorium."
Next, the man shows the interior of one of the rooms and points out that the food window can be opened from inside. However, he says that there is no way for the patients to escape because the only door to the room has a lock on the exterior and can only be opened from the outside.
Netizens were shocked at the facility's strong resemblance to a prison, with many speculating that it was made from prefabricated components for the internment camps in Xinjiang.
"I knew it. It's not so much a hospital as a "medical" internment camp."
"Yeah all those rooms are prefab jail cells and nobody is asking why China has thousands of prefab jail cells ready to go at all times, which isn’t creepy at all and is very normal to have."
"I don’t know of any hospitals where doors open one way."
"Looks eerily like they used a prefab meant to build a Xinjiang internment/death camp. Considering how quickly they could scramble this together, it's not unlikely they took what they already had."
"Locks on the outside? This is a jail cell. What possible justification is there for locks on the outside?"
"Hospitals are usually built to allow free egress for safety... prisons, on the other hand, are not."
"A hospital would have oxygen lines or even power outlets in the rooms. How are they planning to provide intubation to the hundreds of people with severe respiratory distress that should be there? That's a jail for sick people."
Lost in the fanfare over the new hospital are reports that testing kits are in short supply and patients are being turned away from other hospitals in Wuhan, according to the New York Times. The ban on transportation forces patients to trek long distances to reach hospitals, and when people in urgent need of care call for ambulances, they are told there are hundreds of people in the queue.
Contractor reveals the inside of one of the two #Wuhan #coronavirus hospitals that were constructed in 10 days
— Himalaya Global (@HimalayaGlobal) February 3, 2020
Windows wielded shut, doors could not be opened from the inside, items delivered from the small window well
It is more like a prison than a ward#WuhanCoronavirus pic.twitter.com/ccooD2NyYI
