Pakistan, like many other countries, saw great numbers of patients overwhelming the admission capacity of hospitals. Hence, the construction of COVID-19 Emergency Hospitals to effectively respond to the surging number of COVID cases was proposed. A number of these facilities had appeared in China, first in Wuhan and then other cities.1

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Thousands of patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 had to be sent home for isolation and observation. With a shortage of hospital beds, Islamabad needed an approach to rapidly and massively scale its capacity for isolating and caring for patients with moderate to serious COVID-19.

NDMA proposed that the country needed to urgently build and operationalize a prefabricated type infectious diseases hospital along the lines of what China had done in Wuhan, and groundbreaking for IHITC was done by PM Imran Khan on 26 March 2020.2

IHITC was a novel concept in Pakistan wherein, as in Wuhan, it quickly yielded a large infectious diseases hospital built by using fast track delivery methodology. Much had been heard of Chinese engineering and construction speed even before the pandemic, but this was altogether new for Pakistan.

The experience with IHITC during the COVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan suggests that it could be vigorously employed in future public health emergencies as well, particularly other epidemics.

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• 1. Similar prefabricated hospitals appeared in Mexico, Turkey and the UK. China also aided Pakistan in the Isolation Hospital and Infections Treatment Center (IHITC); Pakistan’s first designated prefabricated hospital built by Frontier Works Organization (FWO) and commissioned by National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) to tackle the COVID cases and other epidemics, built in a record time of 40 days.
• 2. IHITC was to have five wards and 250 beds and was planned to be constructed as a pre-engineered building structure of 97,000 square foot covered area over 40 Kanals land. The project included the construction of the hospital with allied hospital facilities and equipment. This hospital primarily aimed to isolate and treat patients with moderate to severe symptoms of COVID-19 from their families and communities while providing medical care, disease monitoring, food, shelter, and social activities in a controlled environment. Unlike other temporary hospitals built elsewhere to cope with the pandemic, IHITC has been designed as a permanent facility to continue functioning even after the current pandemic is over for treating other infectious diseases among the residents of the Capital.