Wuhan Hospital, China

Images of a timelapse were spread all over social media and news outlets in February 2020 as China built a new hospital facility in around 2 weeks 'from scratch'. News outlets reported that the facility has around a 1,000-bed capacity and was designed, procured and built-in this timescale.

It is more likely that the hospital facility is part of a larger state-run emergency action plan which has been sitting designed on a shelf especially for such an event after the last SARs virus outbreak in China.

Regardless if the modular unit construction or design is included in the timescale, it is still an amazing feat to build such a scale of off-site modular building in such a short space of time, and questions are now being asked about why this is not being implemented across the construction industry. The concept is not new, and the Egan Report and Latham report both attempted to resolve issues with wastage in the construction industry.

Further studies will no doubt be carried out on the back of these buildings construction timescales to see what lessons can be learned to improve construction timescales globally.

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