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A field hospital is being built in Prague. Construction of the 500-bed institution will begin on Saturday at the Letnany exhibition area in the northern part of the Czech capital, Interior Minister Jan Hamacek, president of the national crisis team, announced Thursday in Prague.
“Construction of the new hospital beds will begin on Saturday in the Letnany exhibition area. Construction of the 500-bed facility will be secured by the military,” Hamacek told reporters.
“The additional hospital capacity building was necessitated by an unfavorable prognosis of the spread of the epidemic,” Prime Minister Andrej Babis told reporters at the Prague military airport before heading to Brussels for a summit of EU leaders.
“We need to build new hospital beds very quickly, which is a priority in the current situation,” stressed the prime minister. “We no longer have time, the prognosis is not good, the numbers are terrifying, the thing is really, very urgent,” Babis said. The camp hospital staff will be headed by the directors of the public hospitals.
The government has already issued a permit to purchase the necessary hospital beds. The state reserve fund has around 2,500 beds, but the crisis team estimates that this will not be enough to deal with the situation. Babis said he also contacted Bavarian spas and partners about the issue. “The number of infections is increasing everywhere. We have received verbal promises from our neighbors, but we do not want to depend on them, we want to solve everything on our own,” he added.
In the Czech Republic, 9,544 new coronavirus infections were detected on Thursday, the highest number of cases per day. The hospitals serve 2,678 people, 518 of whom are in serious condition. The death toll rose from 35 to 1,172 on Wednesday.
According to the Ministry of Health, there is enough protective equipment. Minister Roman Prymula announced that he had agreed with hospital directors to temporarily postpone planned surgeries to free up as many beds as possible for Covid-19 patients.
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