Doctors with Covid in China say they are forced to work

Health professionals in China would be forced to work even if they were infected with Covid-19, according to a report by the Reuters news agency. The reason would be the high number of patients with the disease in hospitals in the Asian country, which consequently requires more doctors and nurses in the facilities.

Some hospitals in Beijing have up to 80% of their staff infected, but many of them are still forced to work due to staff shortages, a doctor at a large public hospital in Beijing told the agency. According to him, colleagues from other hospitals in the capital have reported the same situation.

Wan Ling, head nurse at a hospital in Huashan, Anhui province, wrote on Weibo – the Chinese social network – that many of her infected colleagues were in a relatively serious condition and had a high fever.

In addition, several doctors at the main public hospital in Wuhan province were also detected with Covid-19, but since Sunday they have not been allowed to leave, according to a pharmaceutical sales representative with knowledge of the matter heard by Reuters.

The Chinese government did not respond to inquiries made by Reuters on the matter, nor did the hospitals mentioned by respondents.

Health experts say the sudden loosening of lockdown rules in China is likely to trigger a spike in severe cases of the disease in coming months. Health authorities have been recommending that people with mild Covid symptoms be quarantined; according to the government, most cases so far are asymptomatic.

In a country of 1.4 billion people, however, any outbreak already threatens the operational capacity of the Chinese health system. “Our hospital is overcrowded with patients. There are between 700 and 800 people with fever arriving every day,” said a doctor surnamed Li at a hospital in Sichuan province.

“We are running out of stock of fever and cold medicine and are now waiting for the suppliers to deliver. Some nurses at the clinic are infected with the virus, there are no special protective measures for the hospital staff, and I believe many of us will soon be infected,” he added.

Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, said insufficient medical resources to deal with an overload of Covid cases had contributed to a rise in deaths in Hong Kong, where infections peaked earlier this year, and warned that the same would happen in China.

“One of the reasons we had such a high death rate [em Hong Kong] it’s because we simply didn’t have enough hospital resources to handle the increase. And unfortunately, that’s what’s going to happen in about one to two months on the mainland,” Cowling said, referring to mainland China.

Still according to him, the situation worsens because, even if the symptoms are mild, infected elderly people need to be monitored frequently by health professionals, which overloads hospitals. Even for this reason, operations and elective surgeries would already be canceled in some cities in the country.

State media Xinhua reported on Tuesday that Beijing had 50 patients hospitalized in serious or critical condition due to the disease. At the same time, the following day, Chinese authorities stated that the easing of restrictions to contain the coronavirus made tracking new cases virtually impossible and that, therefore, the country will no longer release daily reports.

On the same day, the National Health Commission announced the opening of 14,000 Covid symptom monitoring units in large hospitals, in addition to 33,000 similar structures in smaller locations.

Interestingly, the easing of isolation measures and the increase in the number of cases comes days after thousands of Chinese people took to the streets to protest against the dictatorship’s rigid containment policies – demonstrations, it must be said, quite unusual in the country of Xi Jinping.