Around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, former Hong Kong Institution of Engineers president Yuen Pak-leung saw a news report about a 1,000-bed hospital being built in 10 days in the mainland Chinese city of Wuhan.
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Yuen, who had worked in hospital engineering for more than 40 years, was having dim sum but immediately drew a design on paper for an isolation ward, thinking Hong Kong was also capable of doing something similar to Wuhan.
That was in February 2020 and just four months later, Yuen and his fellow healthcare engineers had created the world’s first high-standard negative pressure isolation ward built using the modular integrated construction (MiC) technique.
The government installed the isolation ward at a facility for Covid-19 patients at AsiaWorld-Expo from August 2020 to March 2021. It was later displayed in the Zero Carbon Park in Kowloon Bay.
Yuen recently revealed the ward would be dismantled next year having completed its historic mission, with some of its parts to be used for research purposes.
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