Nurses perform PCR tests on patients at the entrance of a hospital in Shanghai, China. /
“Up to 80%” of the staff of various health centers come to work infected by the shortage of doctors
An unprecedented wave of infections spreads through China days after the government relaxed the harsh restrictions imposed by the ‘covid zero’ policy. Experts predicted that decreeing the end of automatic placement in quarantine centers, added to the cessation of massive PCR test campaigns, would increase the number of positives in the country. And so it is happening. The relaxation of the measures has caused long queues at pharmacies and anti-fever medicines are out of stock.
The worst situation occurs in hospitals, where a growing number of doctors and nurses have been infected and, even so, have been required to go to work due to the large accumulation of patients who arrive with symptoms of coronavirus, according to the Reuters agency. From the public hospital in Beijing they affirm that they have “up to 80%” of the infected personnel. The same situation occurs in other large centers in the capital that suffer from a shortage of personnel and where operations and surgeries have been canceled unless the patient is in an extremely serious situation.
Wan Ling, head nurse at a hospital in Huashan, Anhui province, denounced on the Weibo social network that many of her colleagues were infected, relatively serious and with “high fever”. At the Tongji health center, located in Wuhan, several doctors also tested positive. “They have to stay at work while they are sick,” an unnamed internal source told Reuters.
Cases have skyrocketed in the Asian giant, but it is “impossible” to determine the true magnitude of the epidemiological situation, the health authorities acknowledged yesterday. “Many asymptomatic people no longer take PCR tests, making it impossible to accurately determine the real number of infected people,” they warned from the Ministry of Health.
embroidered
What is known is that hospitals are overwhelmed. “Every day between 700 and 800 people arrive with a fever,” warned Li, a doctor at a health center in Sichuan province, after denouncing that they had run out of “stocks of medicines for fever and cold.” We are waiting for the delivery of new suppliers.” “Almost 200 patients with covid symptoms came to me last night,” said an employee at the Chengdu clinic. In this sense, Li reported that “some nurses tested positive. There are no special protection measures for the staff and I think that many of us will soon be infected.”
During the pandemic, China has opened 14,000 fever clinics in large hospitals and 33,000 in community health centers. Almost 30% of those over the age of 80 have not been vaccinated and only 40% have received the booster dose.
Without the measures, scenes of collapse in hospitals like those seen at the start of the pandemic that has hit the world are repeated. Vice Premier Sun Chunlan warned that new infections in Beijing are “growing rapidly.” Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, assured that medical resources are insufficient to deal with the overload of positives; which is why during the pandemic there has been a high mortality rate in this city, he said. “And unfortunately, that’s what’s going to happen in about a month or two,” he warned. The die is cast.