After the CCP abandoned its zero-clearing policy, a tsunami of epidemics broke out across the country, especially in Beijing. Hospitals and crematoria are overcrowded. The picture shows a hospital in Beijing on December 21, 2022. (JADE GAO/AFP via Getty Images)
Update 2022-12-27 10:17 AM
[The Epoch Times, December 27, 2022] (Comprehensive report
by Epoch Times reporter Xia Yu) After the CCP abandoned the zero-clearing
policy, a tsunami of
epidemics broke out across the country, especially in Beijing
. Hospitals and crematoria are overcrowded. Foreign doctors who
have practiced medicine in Beijing for many years say the situation is
unprecedented and the CCP is politicizing the death toll.
Howard Bernstein, a foreign doctor practicing in a private
hospital in Beijing, said he had never seen anything like this in more than
three decades of his career as an emergency doctor, Reuters reported.
The hospital is overwhelmed from top to bottom and the biggest challenge is being unprepared.
More and more patients came to the hospital where he
worked. Nearly all were elderly, and many were very ill with symptoms of
COVID and pneumonia, he said.
Bernstein's account mirrored similar testimonies from
medical workers across China, where doctors were overwhelmed by a wave of
infections across the country after the Communist Party abruptly abandoned its
zero-clearing policy on Dec. 7.
It is the largest outbreak in China since the COVID-19
pandemic broke out in Wuhan three years ago. Government hospitals and
crematoria in Beijing have been overloaded since December because of the high
number of cases.
"The hospital is overwhelmed from top to bottom,"
Bernstein told Reuters at the end of an "intense" shift at the
private United Family Hospital in eastern Beijing.
"The ICU is full," he said, as were the emergency rooms,
fever clinics and other wards.
"A lot of people end up in the hospital. They don't get
better in a day or two, and people keep coming to the emergency room, but they
can't go upstairs to the ward," he said. "They (patients) stay in the
emergency room for several days. sky."
From never treating a single COVID patient in the past
month, Bernstein has now seen dozens a day.
"Honestly, I think the biggest challenge is that we are
not prepared for this," he said.
Doctors fear the worst is yet to come for Beijing
Sonia Jutard-Bourreau, 48, chief medical officer at the
private Raffles Hospital in Beijing, said the number of patients was five to
six times the normal level, with the average age of patients in their 70s, The
average age of patients a week ago was in their 30s.
She said patients and their relatives came to Raffles
because local hospitals were "overwhelmed" and they wanted to buy
Pfizer's COVID treatment Paxlovid, which was out of stock in many places,
including Raffles.
"They want this drug as a replacement for a vaccine,
but this drug is not a replacement for a vaccine," Juttad-Bro said, adding
that her team has strict criteria for when it can be prescribed.
Juttad-Bro, who, like Bernstein, has worked in China for
about a decade, worries that the worst of Beijing's outbreak is yet to come
On December 22, 2022, at a crematorium in
Beijing, a family followed an urn containing the ashes of their loved ones. (STF/AFP)
A large number of medical staff infected with the virus
Elsewhere in China, medical staff told Reuters that
resources have been stretched to the limit in some cases because of
particularly high levels of COVID infection and illness among staff.
A nurse in Xi'an said 45 of the 51 nurses in her department
and all emergency department staff had contracted the virus in recent weeks.
"Many of my colleagues are positive cases," said a
22-year-old nurse surnamed Wang. "Almost all doctors are disappointed by
this."
Wang and nurses at other hospitals said they were told to
come to work even if they tested positive and had a mild fever.
Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse on the psychiatric ward of a
hospital in Hubei province, said staff attendance at her ward had dropped by more
than 50%, and the ward had stopped accepting new patients. She said she
worked shifts of more than 16 hours without adequate support.
“I worry that if a patient is agitated, you have to
hold them back, but you can’t do that easily on your own,”
she said. “It’s not normal.”
Mortality is 'politicized'
Doctors interviewed by Reuters said they were most worried
about the elderly, who experts estimate tens of thousands could die from.
British health data company Airfinity has estimated that
more than 5,000 people may die from COVID-19 in China every day, in stark
contrast to Beijing's official figures.
China's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said
Sunday that no COVID deaths were reported in mainland China in the six days
through Sunday, despite a surge in crematorium business.
On
December 22, 2022, in Beijing, the outside of the crematorium was full of
hearses waiting to enter. (STF/AFP)
China has also revised its definition of what causes a death
to be classified as a COVID death, counting only deaths involving pneumonia or
respiratory failure caused by COVID, which has raised concerns among world
health experts.
"It's not medicine, it's politics," Juttad-Bro
said. "If they're dying of COVID now, it's because of COVID. The death
rate is now a political number, not a medical number."
WHO experts said the lack of data from China may indicate
that the Chinese Communist Party system is overwhelmed. But experts have
also pointed out that the way Beijing records the number of deaths from
COVID-19 may minimize the scale of the outbreak.
Mike Ryan, head of WHO's health emergencies programme, said:
"Restricting the diagnosis of 'COVID-19 death' to people who have tested
positive for the virus and have respiratory failure will greatly underestimate
the number of deaths related to COVID-19. The true death toll associated with
the virus."
"We don't want (the Chinese Communist Party's)
definition to prevent (us) from actually getting the right data," Ryan
added.
Speaking in Geneva last week, he noted that "given the
severity of the infection, in people who die from COVID, many different [body]
system problems are also fatal," not just respiratory failure.
Responsible Editor: Ye Ziwei
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/12/26/n13892279.htm
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