Coroanvirus in China: ‘The ICU is full’ Medical staff on frontline of China’s Covid fight say hospitals are ‘overwhelmed’ | World News

BEIJING: For more than three decades of emergency medicine, doctors in Beijing Howard Bernstein said he had never seen anything like this.
Patients come to his hospital in increasing numbers; almost all of them are old people and many are very unwell with Covid and pneumonia symptoms, he said.
Bernstein’s account reflects similar testimony from medical workers across China who are struggling to cope after China abruptly changed its previously strict Covid policy this month , followed by a nationwide wave of infections.
It is by far the country’s largest outbreak since the pandemic began in downtown Wuhan three years ago. Beijing government hospitals and crematoriums are also struggling this month due to strong demand.
“Hospitals are overwhelmed from top to bottom,” Bernstein told Reuters at the end of a “tense” shift at the privately owned Beijing Unified Family Hospital in the east of the capital.
“The intensive care unit is full,” so are the emergency departments, fever clinics and other wards, he said.
“A lot of them were hospitalized. They didn’t get better for a day or two, so there was no outflow, and so people kept going to the emergency room, but they couldn’t get to the hospital room in the hospital. upstairs,” he said. speak. “They were stuck in the emergency room for days.”
In the past month, Bernstein has gone from never treating a single Covid patient to seeing dozens of patients a day.
“Honestly, the biggest challenge is that I think we’re not prepared for this,” he said.
Sonia Jutard-Bourreau, 48, medical director at Raffles Private Hospital in Beijing, said the number of patients was five to six times higher than normal, and the average age of patients had increased by about 40 years. over 70 in recent times. week.
“It’s always been the same,” she said. “That’s mostly unvaccinated patients.”
Patients and their loved ones visit Raffles, she said, because local hospitals are “overcrowded”, and because they want to buy Paxlovid, the Covid-19 drug manufactured by Pfizer, which many places, including Raffles, are running out.
“They wanted the drug to be like a vaccine substitute, but not a vaccine,” said Jutard-Bourreau, adding that there are strict criteria for when their team you can prescribe.
Jutard-Bourreau, like Bernstein, has been working in China for about a decade, concerned that the worst of this wave in Beijing is yet to come.
Elsewhere in China, medical workers told Reuters resources were being overused in some cases, because of Covid and particularly high levels of staff illness.
A nurse in the city of 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 a lot of positive cases among my colleagues,” said the 22-year-old nurse. King. “Almost all doctors are frustrated with it.”
Wang and nurses at other hospitals said they were told to go to work even if they tested positive and had a low-grade fever.
Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse in the psychiatric ward at a hospital in Hubei province, said the number of staff coming to her ward has dropped by more than 50%, which has stopped accepting new patients. She said she was working 16+ hour shifts without enough support.
“I’m worried that if the patient shows signs of agitation, they have to be restrained, but it can’t be done alone,” she said. “It’s not a great situation to be in.”

“Political” Mortality Rate

Doctors who spoke to Reuters said they were most worried about the elderly, tens of thousands of whom could die, according to expert estimates.
More than 5,000 people could die every day from Covid-19 in China, UK-based health data company Airfinity estimates, in stark contrast to official data from Beijing on the current outbreak of COVID-19. country.
The National Health Commission did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment regarding the concerns raised by healthcare workers in this article.
China reported no Covid deaths on the mainland in the six days to Sunday, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday, even as crematoriums face face increased demand.
China has narrowed its definition to classify deaths as Covid-related, counting only those related to pneumonia or respiratory failure caused by Covid, prompting world health experts to raised eyebrows.
“It’s not medicine, it’s politics,” says Jutard-Bourreau. “If they’re dying from Covid now it’s because of Covid. Death rates now are political numbers, not medical ones.”