The announcement comes after China locked down eight cities and their 25 million residents in an unprecedented effort to try to contain the deadly new coronavirus that has spread in the Lunar New Year travel rush, SIA reports.

The cities are all located in Central China's Hubei province, where the illness has been concentrated. Outbound flights were canceled and normally bustling streets, shops, restaurants and other public spaces in the city were eerily empty.

The city of Wuhan has announced this morning that it will build a designated hospital with space for 1,000 beds by February, 3rd, in the style of a facility that Beijing constructed during the SARS epidemic in 2003. Police, SWAT teams and paramilitary troops guarded the city's train station, where metal barriers blocked the entrances.

“To my knowledge, trying to contain a city of 11 million people is new to science," Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization's representative in China, told the AP, speaking about Wuhan, a city at the epicentre of the crisis. “It has not been tried before as a public health measure. We cannot at this stage say it will or it will not work." Similar travel restrictions will apply in nearby cities Huanggang and Ezhou from Friday.

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