BEIJING (Reuters) – In greater than three a long time of emergency medicine, Beijing-based doctor Howard Bernstein said, he has never seen anything like this.
Patients are arriving at his hospital in ever-increasing numbers; just about all are elderly and lots of are very unwell with COVID and pneumonia symptoms, he said.
Bernstein’s account reflects similar testimony from medical staff across China who’re scrambling to manage after China’s abrupt U-turn on its previously strict COVID policies this month was followed by a nationwide wave of infections.
It’s by far the country’s biggest outbreak for the reason that pandemic began within the central city of Wuhan three years ago. Beijing government hospitals and crematoriums even have been struggling this month amid heavy demand.
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“The hospital is just overwhelmed from top to bottom,” Bernstein told Reuters at the top of a “stressful” shift on the privately owned Beijing United Family Hospital within the east of the capital.
“The ICU is full,” as are the emergency department, the fever clinic and other wards, he said.
“A number of them got admitted to the hospital. They are not convalescing in a day or two, so there isn’t any flow, and subsequently people keep coming to the ER, but they can not go upstairs into hospital rooms,” he said. “They’re stuck within the ER for days.”
Prior to now month, Bernstein went from never having treated a COVID patient to seeing dozens a day.
“The most important challenge, truthfully, is I feel we were just unprepared for this,” he said.
Sonia Jutard-Bourreau, 48, chief medical officer on the private Raffles Hospital in Beijing, said patient numbers are five to 6 times their normal levels, and patients’ average age has shot up by about 40 years to over 70 within the space of every week.
“It is usually the identical profile,” she said. “That’s a lot of the patients haven’t been vaccinated.”
The patients and their relatives visit Raffles because local hospitals are “overwhelmed”, she said, and since they want to purchase Paxlovid, the Pfizer-made COVID treatment, which many places, including Raffles, are running low on.
“They need the medication like a alternative of the vaccine, but the medication doesn’t replace the vaccine,” Jutard-Bourreau said, adding that there are strict criteria for when her team can prescribe it.
Jutard-Bourreau, who like Bernstein has been working in China for around a decade, fears that the worst of this wave in Beijing has not arrived yet.
Elsewhere in China, medical staff told Reuters that resources are already stretched to the breaking point in some cases, as COVID and sickness levels amongst staff have been particularly high.
One nurse based within the western city of Xian said 45 of 51 nurses in her department and all staff within the emergency department have caught the virus in recent weeks.
“There are such a lot of positive cases amongst my colleagues,” said the 22-year-old nurse, surnamed Wang. “Just about all the doctors are down with it.”
Wang and nurses at other hospitals said that they had been told to report for duty even in the event that they test positive and have a gentle fever.
Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse on a psychiatric ward at a hospital in Hubei province, said staff attendance has been down greater than 50 percent on her ward, which has stopped accepting latest patients. She said she is working shifts of greater than 16 hours with insufficient support.
“I worry that if the patient appears to be agitated, you’ve to restrain them, but you can not easily do it alone,” she said. “It is not an excellent situation to be in.”
MORTALITY RATE “POLITICAL”
The doctors who spoke to Reuters said they were most anxious concerning the elderly, tens of 1000’s of whom may die, in line with estimates from experts.
Greater than 5,000 individuals are probably dying every day from COVID-19 in China, Britain-based health data firm Airfinity estimated, offering a dramatic contrast to official data from Beijing on the country’s current outbreak.
The National Health Commission didn’t immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment on the concerns raised by medical staff in this text.
China reported no COVID deaths on the mainland for the six days through Sunday, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said on Sunday, whilst crematories faced surging demand.
China has narrowed its definition for classifying deaths as COVID-related, counting only those involving COVID-caused pneumonia or respiratory failure, raising eyebrows amongst world health experts.
“It is not medicine, it’s politics,” said Jutard-Bourreau. “In the event that they’re dying now with COVID it’s due to COVID. The mortality rate now it’s political numbers, not medical.”
(Additional reporting by the Beijing Newsroom. Editing by Gerry Doyle)
Copyright 2022 Thomson Reuters.