Via The Guardian: Chinese doctors and nurses reportedly told to work while infected as Covid surges. Excerpt:
Chinese doctors and nurses are being told to keep working even when infected with Covid-19, staff and residents reported, as the virus rips through the population in the wake of eased restrictions.
Some hospitals in Beijing have up to 80% of their staff infected, but many of them are still required to work due to staff shortages, a doctor in a large public hospital in Beijing told Reuters, adding he had spoken to his peers at other big hospitals in the capital.
All operations and surgeries had been cancelled at his hospital unless the patient was “dying tomorrow”, he said, declining to be named due to the sensitivity of the subject.
A senior World Health Organization official said on Wednesday that China’s flare-up started “long before” restrictions were lifted, but since the sudden shift in policy major cities in Beijing appear to have experienced a huge surge in cases of Covid-19. Authorities have said it is “impossible” to measure, since most people are not being tested.
“The explosion of cases in China had started long before any easing of the zero-Covid policy,” WHO emergencies chief Michael Ryan said on Wednesday. “There’s a narrative that, in some way, China lifted the restrictions and all of a sudden, the disease is out of control,” he added at the UN health agency’s headquarters in Geneva.
“The disease was spreading intensively because the control measures in themselves were not stopping the disease.”
In Sichuan, a doctor surnamed Li told Reuters that their tertiary hospital was “overwhelmed with patients”.
“There are 700, 800 people with fever coming every day,” Li said. “We are running out of medicine stocks for fever and cold. A few nurses at the fever clinic were tested positive, there aren’t any special protective measures for hospital staff and I believe many of us will soon get infected.”
Claims of rampant infections among hospital staff are also spreading across social media. One Chongqing resident said primary care in their city had “imploded”.
“80% of the newly admitted patients in our small third-level respiratory department in a remote city are positive,” they wrote on Weibo.
“From December 8, when the first positive patient was allowed to be admitted, to today, December 13, at least half of the medical staff in our department were infected. At the beginning the infected were allowed to go home to rest, but now as long as it is not very serious symptoms, they are not allowed to go home.”
