Thanks to David Paulk for tweeting the link to this report in Sixth Tone: Coronavirus’ Assault on Wuhan Mental Hospital Alarms Experts. Excerpt:
Experts are for calling for more stringent measures to protect people with psychological conditions after at least 80 patients and staff at a mental health facility in Wuhan contracted the coronavirus that has now killed more than 1,300 people in China and infected over 60,000 worldwide.
Domestic magazine China Newsweek reported last weekend that over 80 patients and medical workers at Wuhan Mental Health Center had been diagnosed with novel coronavirus pneumonia, or COVID-19. An employee of the center who declined to use her name because she was not permitted to speak with media told Sixth Tone on Wednesday that the hospital had stopped admitting new patients “for fear of cross-contamination.”
“We have suspected patients, confirmed patients, and severely ill patients,” the staff member said. “All of our (spare) rooms are being used to accommodate infected patients, and we have a shortage of protective gear.”
Wuhan Mental Health Center, also known as Wuhan Psychiatric Hospital, is the largest mental hospital in the central Hubei province. Isolation wards comprise much of the hospital’s facilities, posing a high risk of cross-contamination among patients and medical professionals alike.
A former patient who was hospitalized at the facility last year told Sixth Tone that the conditions in her ward were poor. She described how the primary and secondary care areas were kept segregated by a sturdy metal door: In the primary care area, most of the rooms had three beds, she said, while in the larger secondary care area, five or six people might share the same living space.
“One side of each bed was attached to the wall — otherwise they wouldn’t all fit,” she said, adding that most rooms did not have their own toilet.
A doctor at the facility told China Newsweek that some 10 inpatients developed fevers beginning around Jan. 12. The hospital’s infection control personnel assumed the fevers were the result of a common cold.
“At first, we didn’t know that the (coronavirus) disease could be transmitted from one person to another,” an employee from the hospital’s publicity office told online media outlet Pear Video. “We didn’t have sufficient awareness of the disease.”
The first symptoms were observed the day after Wuhan’s health commission claimed on Jan. 11 that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, and that no new cases had been detected since Jan. 3. The city’s health authorities also denied that medical workers were contracting the virus from their patients — though an investigation by domestic media outlet Caixin later found otherwise.
