[ad_1]
BEIJING, China — After the first infections of COVID-19 passed in China’s big cities, all eyes are on rural areas, as a new wave of infections is predicted, preparing for China’s remote and often poor regions will be complicated.
Although we have good health care facilities in a big city like Shanghai, we were completely overwhelmed. We can only wait to see what happens in the countryside, where a 25-year-old medical student works as a pediatrician in one of Shanghai’s largest children’s hospitals. He told Fox News Digital.
See: China’s Censors Struggle with Protest Videos; Opponents are learning a ‘sophisticated’ LOOPHOLE.
“We don’t know what happened when the government suddenly released all the COVID-19 restrictions. We were not prepared.”
A man shops for face masks on a sidewalk in Beijing, Jan. 7, 2023. China has banned more than 1,000 social media accounts critical of government policies on COVID-19, Saturday, Jan. 7, 2023. 19 pandemic, as the country moves to reopen.
(AP Photo/Andy Wong)
The pediatrician, whose name I gave with difficulty, said, “The hospital is overcrowded, everywhere you look there are parents with their children. I work 55 hours in a regular week, but I stop counting hours at peak times. We are not forced to work overtime, but there is no way we can help everyone if we don’t.” We all know.
China eases ‘ZERO-COVID’ policy from Xi Jinping in ‘rare show of weakness’, says Tiananmen Square protesters
She said the conditions to treat the sick are very few. “We were in a patient for four to five minutes. I felt bad, because parents had to wait hours before seeing a doctor, and we could only do an assessment for a few minutes. But there was no other way. Fortunately, the parents were like that. Thank you. We are all in this. I guess it’s obvious that we are.
Wearing a mask, she walks past workers as they decorate a display celebrating Beijing’s 20th Party Congress, holding a child.
(AP Photo/By Han Guan)
Most of China’s biggest cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have passed the initial peak of Covid. In a recent study in Frontiers of Medicine, a Chinese state-funded journal, researchers in Shanghai predict that the first wave will hit rural China by the end of January.
As China celebrates the Lunar New Year, experts worry that millions of people fleeing the big cities could leave rural areas vulnerable to the virus due to lack of healthcare facilities. People who live a few hours away from cities are advised to go back to their cities if they get sick, but this is only an option for some.
China defends its handling of Covid after who says Beijing is underreporting deaths
“It is not difficult to assess when a child is seriously ill with COVID. Any basic doctor can work in urban or rural areas. The problem is not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of resources. For serious cases, there are people. To come to big cities for treatment,” the Shanghai pediatrician added.
Fortunately, the children’s hospital where she works is better prepared for the influx of patients. Doctors from other departments have been scheduled to work in the fever clinic, many rooms have been cleaned and medicine seems to be available again. “I’m ready for the second wave, it can’t be worse than the first,” she said.
Patients lie on beds and stretchers in a corridor in a hospital emergency room during an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), in Shanghai, China, 4 January 2023.
(Reuters)
For the first time since lifting zero-covid restrictions in early December 2022, Chinese authorities released data on Covid-related deaths late last week. According to official statistics, nearly 60,000 people died in hospitals between December 8, 2022 and January 12, 2023. Health conditions.
Click here to access the FOX NEWS app
Experts outside China, including the World Health Organization, say these numbers seem unrealistic. The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHMA) predicts that China could experience one million deaths from the coronavirus by 2023.
“The only way I can explain these low numbers is that people do not allow their loved ones to die in the hospital. As for children, they are always taken home by their parents when there is no hope of recovery,” explained the pediatrician. In those cases, tracking Covid deaths becomes more challenging.
In comments reported by state media on Thursday, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said the virus was at a “relatively low” level, while health officials said the number of COVID patients in hospitals and in critical condition was falling.
Reuters Contributed to this article.
[ad_2]
Source link
