I wonder why Wuhan authorities opted for new construction over using available spaces that surely must exist in a 10M city when everything is shut down?

There were convention centers converted to isolate patients in Wuhan too. Basically, Wuhan needed both more hospital beds for people requiring intensive care, and more beds for isolating infected patients with mild symptoms. Only the second kind can be in placed in conventional centers.

Wuhan wanted to put the hospital away from city center. And did not want to contaminate existing spaces.

In NYC, there is very little space for something new. And the existing structures are poor locations for actual hospitals.

If the economy is going to be down for a while, might as well use a public space that is shut down for that purpose.

It seems you’re not familiar with the situation.

Those new temporary hospital units that they built in 2 weeks, are specialized, negative pressure rooms, that sucks the air out of the room, and runs it through a scrubbing filter, before safely expelling it outside into the atmosphere.

They learned their lesson from SARS, and built these special care units, to treat pulmonary infectious diseases.

These negative pressure rooms will help minimize infected air, such as when you do an intubation, and the virus get aerosolized, then it helps to vacuum the virus out of the air inside the room.

These hospitals were built to treat their most critical cases. Then, they later built general facilities in sporting stadiums, for milder cases, to keep these infected patients away from their families and the public, while they recovered. In retrospect, they should have built these two types of facilities in parallel. This appears to be a lesson learned for them. They underestimated the magnitude of the infection rate, and later realized that milder cases can be triaged and treated separately.

Granted, not a whole lot of information about this was shared in Western media; since most of the effort, was spent smearing China, and their terrible authoritarian government.

And whatever was reported was dumbed down for western audiences. This was frustrating when you wanted to find actual information, and you had to dig deeper, to find actual useful information about what was happening on the ground.

Note: As typical of HN readers, I’m expecting to get docked -4 points for this post, because I actually wrote something positive about China’s efforts to contain the coronavirus. In the end, apparently, it worked.

Perhaps it was to enlist the unemployed. Lots of people losing jobs because of the epidemic + need for hospitals to mitigate epidemic effects = build hospitals?

That was least of China's worries. They clearly focused on pandemic resolution at the expense of everything else.

PR reasons, probably. It gave a big, visible, livestreamed 24/7 impression of progress towards doing something against the disease in a way that other countries wouldn't be able to match.

Available spaces were most probably not fit to serve as hospital for airborne infectious disease. Water/air ducts, isolation rooms, medical equipment and so on.

Why are they not using college dorms instead? There's already beds there and there's a modicum of isolation.

Here in New York, they're building a facility at one university, though the dorms are going to be used to house workers rather than patients.

https://riverheadlocal.com/2020/03/22/as-suffolk-coronavirus...

I have no actual idea, but would venture to guess that all dorms in NY are old buildings with HVAC/Electrical/Elevators/Hallway sizes that aren't good enough for medical care.

Lived in the international house in NY many years back. I would add bedbugs to the list!