'ICU is full': Frontline workers in China's COVID response say hospitals are 'overwhelmed'

BEIJING, Dec 26 (Reuters) – In more than three decades of emergency medicine, Beijing doctor Howard Bernstein said he had never seen anything like it.

Patients arrive at his hospital in ever-increasing numbers; Almost all are elderly and many are very sick with symptoms of COVID and pneumonia, he said.

Bernstein’s account mirrors similar testimonies from medical personnel across China who are struggle to cope After China’s abrupt U-turn on its previously strict COVID policies this month was followed by a nationwide wave of infections.

It is by far the country’s biggest outbreak since the pandemic began in the central city of Wuhan three years ago. Beijing government hospitals and crematoriums also struggled this month amid high demand.

“The hospital is just overwhelmed from top to bottom,” Bernstein told Reuters at the end of a “stressful” shift at the private Beijing United Family Hospital in the capital’s east.

“The intensive care unit is full,” as are the emergency department, fever clinic and others, he said.

“A lot of them have been admitted to hospital. They don’t get better in a day or two, so there’s no flow, and so people keep coming to the emergency room, but they can’t. not go up to hospital rooms,” he said. said. “They’re stuck in the ER for days.”

Over the past month, Bernstein has gone from never treating a COVID patient to seeing dozens a day.

“Honestly, the biggest challenge is that I think we just weren’t prepared for it,” he said.

Sonia Jutard-Bourreau, 48, chief medical officer at the private Raffles Hospital in Beijing, said the number of patients was five to six times higher than its normal level and the average age of patients had increased by around 40 years to reach more than 70 years in the space of a week.

“It’s always the same profile,” she says. “That is, most patients have not been vaccinated.”

Patients and their loved ones visit Raffles because local hospitals are “overwhelmed”, she said, and because they want to buy Paxlovid, the Pfizer-made COVID treatment that many places, including Raffles, are short of.

“They want the drug as a replacement for the vaccine, but the drug is not a replacement for the vaccine,” Jutard-Bourreau said, adding that there are strict criteria for determining when his team can prescribe it.

Jutard-Bourreau, who like Bernstein has been working in China for ten years, fears that the worst of this wave in Beijing has not yet arrived.

Elsewhere in China, medical staff told Reuters resources were already stretched in some cases as levels of COVID and illness among staff were particularly high.

A nurse based in the western city of Xian said 45 of 51 nurses on her ward and all emergency department staff had caught the virus in recent weeks.

“There are so many positive cases among my colleagues,” said the 22-year-old nurse, surnamed Wang. “Almost all doctors agree.”

Wang and nurses from other hospitals said they were told to report to work even though they tested positive and had a mild fever.

Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse on a psychiatric ward at a hospital in Hubei province, said staff attendance was down more than 50% on her ward, which stopped accepting new patients. She said she was working shifts longer than 16 hours with insufficient support.

“I’m afraid if the patient seems agitated you should restrain them, but you can’t easily do that alone,” she said. “It’s not a good situation to be in.”

“POLITICAL” MORTALITY RATE

Doctors who spoke to Reuters said they were most worried about the elderly, tens of thousands of whom could die, according to expert estimates.

More than 5,000 people likely die from COVID-19 every day in ChinaBritish health data firm Airfinity estimated, providing a dramatic contrast to Beijing’s official data on the country’s current outbreak.

The National Health Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters on the concerns raised by medical staff in this article.

China reported no COVID deaths on the mainland in the six days to Sunday, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said Sunday, even as crematoria faced growing demand.

China has narrowed its definition to classify deaths as COVID-related, counting only those involving pneumonia or respiratory failure caused by COVID, raising eyebrows among global health experts.

“It’s not medicine, it’s politics,” said Jutard-Bourreau. “If they’re dying now with COVID, it’s because of COVID. The death rate now is political numbers, not medical.”

Additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom. Editing by Gerry Doyle

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