Staff members work in a laboratory in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province, Feb 13, 2020. Photo: Xinhua

China's top economic planner released a new development scheme on Wednesday which says every province in the country should have at least one P3 laboratory and every prefecture-level city should have at least one P2 lab.

The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) together with two other governmental departments released a plan on capacity of public health prevention, control and treatment.

The epidemic prevention and control during the coronavirus outbreak exposed some shortcomings in the capability and system. Therefore, the plan proposed to build more P3 and P2 laboratories which would have the ability to test for infectious pathogen.

As for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the county level, they need to upgrade laboratory equipment and step up biosecurity.

For the CDCs at the national and provincial level, they need to improve their ability to test for infectious diseases in one-shot and enhance their responses in the prevention of infectious diseases.

As for hospitals, county-level hospitals should expand their ICU beds by allocating 2 to 5 percent of beds to ICU wards.

Every city needs to expand one or two of their medical institutions. For cities with populations of less than 1 million, the medical institution that is chosen to be expanded should set up 100 to 600 hospital beds and for cities with more than 5 million people, the expanded institution should have more than 600 hospital beds.

The plan also proposed to improve construction standards of large sports venues and exhibition centers by using Fangcang makeshift hospitals as their reference.

Meanwhile, every province needs to ensure there are adequate amounts of medical masks, protective suits and eye patches that can last for at least 10 days.