Funviralpark BEIJING (Reuters) – In more than 30 years of emergency medicine, Beijing-based doctor Howard Bernstein said he had never seen anything like it.
The number of patients arriving at his hospital continues to grow. Almost all are elderly, and many are very ill with symptoms of COVID and pneumonia, he said.
Bernstein’s account comes after China made a sudden U-turn on its stringent COVID policies earlier this month, followed by a wave of nationwide infections, followed by similar outbursts from medical staff across China rushing to respond. It reflects the testimony of
It is by far the largest outbreak in the country since the pandemic began in central Wuhan three years ago. Beijing government hospitals and crematoriums have also struggled with heavy demand this month.
“The hospital is overwhelmed from top to bottom,” Bernstein told Reuters at the end of a “stressful” shift at the privately run Beijing United Family Hospital, east of the capital.
“The ICU is full,” he said, as were the emergency department, fever clinic and other wards.
“A lot of them end up in the hospital. They don’t get better in a day or two, so there’s no flow. So people keep coming to the ER, but they can’t go upstairs,” he said. said. He said. “They’ve been stuck in the ER for days.”
In the past month, Bernstein has gone from treating no COVID patients to seeing dozens of patients a day.
“Honestly, I think the biggest challenge was that we weren’t ready for this,” he said.
Sonia Jutard Borrow, 48, chief medical officer at Beijing’s private Raffles Hospital, said the number of patients was five to six times normal and the average age of patients jumped from about 40 to over 70. said. week.
“It’s always the same profile,” she said. “It’s that most patients aren’t vaccinated.”
Patients and their families are visiting Raffles because local hospitals are “overwhelmed” and want to buy Paxlovid, a COVID treatment made by Pfizer that is in short supply in many places, including Raffles. She said it was because
“They want drugs that are like vaccine replacements, but drugs don’t replace vaccines,” said Jutard Borrow, who has strict criteria for when her team can prescribe them. added.
Jutard Breau, who like Bernstein has been in China for about a decade, fears the worst of this wave in Beijing is yet to come.
Elsewhere in China, medical staff told Reuters that resources were already at breaking point in some cases due to particularly high levels of COVID and illness among staff.
A nurse based in Xi’an said 45 of the 51 nurses in her department and all staff in the emergency department had contracted the virus in recent weeks.
“There are so many positive cases among my colleagues,” said a 22-year-old nurse surnamed Wang. “Almost all doctors disagree with that.”
Wang and other hospital nurses said they were told to come to work even if they tested positive and had a mild fever.
Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse who works in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Hubei province, said her ward has seen staff attendance drop by more than 50% and has stopped accepting new patients. She said she works shifts of 16 hours or more with inadequate support for her.
“If a patient seems upset, I’m afraid I have to restrain him, but I can’t easily do it alone,” she said. “It’s not a great situation.”
Mortality “political”
Doctors interviewed by Reuters said they were most worried about the elderly, who experts estimated could kill tens of thousands of people.
In China, where it is estimated that perhaps more than 5,000 people die each day from COVID-19, UK-based health data firm Airfinity shows a dramatic contrast to official Beijing data on the country’s current outbreak. I’m here.
The National Health Board did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment on the concerns raised by medical staff in this article.
The China Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday that no COVID deaths were reported on the mainland in the six days leading up to Sunday, even as crematoria faced surging demand.
China has narrowed its definition of classifying deaths as COVID-related, counting only those related to COVID-induced pneumonia or respiratory failure, raising eyebrows among global health experts.
“This is politics, not medicine,” said Juttal Borrow. “If they are dying of COVID now, it is because of COVID. The current mortality rate is a political number, not a medical one.”
Additional coverage by Beijing Newsroom.Editing by Jerry Doyle
Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
