China’s provinces send medical teams to Beijing to battle Covid

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Beijing’s hospitals are struggling to cope as China grapples with its first wave of Covid-19 mass infections. (AP pic)
BEIJING: As Beijing’s already strained health care system braces for a peak in severe Covid infections, several provinces have sent medical teams to the capital, despite criticism from local health officials and workers that they, too, are stretched to their limits.
Caixin has learned that teams of medical workers, including senior doctors, have been dispatched from Shandong, Hubei and Jiangsu provinces to Beijing to treat seriously ill patients.
Of the teams, the one from Jiangsu in eastern China consists of about 160 workers.
Provinces including Hunan and Sichuan are also sending or preparing to send medical teams to Beijing, health workers told Caixin.

While it’s not uncommon for regions to mobilise medical staff to help contain outbreaks in other areas, this cross-regional support is seen as unacceptable to many local health officials and frontline workers, who said the current wave of Covid is affecting the entire country, and that medical resources are stretched everywhere.
“The number of seriously ill patients in other parts of the country will not be proportionally less than that in Beijing,” a former long-time emergency department physician told Caixin.
“Even if all medical personnel in the country are transferred to Beijing, will it solve the problem?”
While peaks vary from region to region, the medical infrastructure is under pressure everywhere and all regions would have medical workers infected with the virus and face potential staff shortages, said the doctor.

“We’re stretched to the limit, too,” a source within the health care system in Jiangsu’s Suzhou told Caixin, noting that the city is reaching an infection peak.
The moves come as Covid is spreading wildly across China amid easing of restrictions. Beijing was among the major cities first hit by the surging outbreak.
Wang Guangfa, a respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital, told media that the capital experienced a “tsunami” of infections last week, including among medical workers, leaving the local health care system understaffed.
Wang predicted Beijing would see a peak in severe cases in one or two weeks, news site yxj.org.cn reported Monday.
On Wednesday, Caixin visited several general hospitals around Beijing and saw the same scenes over and over: overcrowded emergency departments and resuscitation rooms short of beds, resulting in elderly patients being relegated to camp stretchers or wheelchairs to receive intravenous drips.
Beijing has some of the top medical resources in the country. Government data showed that in 2021, 5.64 of every 1,000 people in the capital were licensed physicians and 6.47 were registered nurses, both of which were nearly double the national average last year.
Authorities in several provinces, including Hainan, Jiangxi and Anhui, as well as the city of Chengdu, have publicly stated that infections have peaked or are about to peak in the near future.
And while the worst of the outbreak has yet to arrive in Qingdao, the eastern city is now seeing 490,000 to 530,000 Covid cases every day, and the infection rate would increase by another 10% over the weekend, local authorities said Friday, according to official newspaper Qingdao Daily.
As of Saturday, China has reported no new Covid deaths for four straight days, after seven in Beijing in two days.
However, the official statistics do not reflect the true impact of the Omicron wave, as the country has changed the way it counts Covid deaths, under which most people who die after suffering from both Covid and other illnesses are not classified as dying from the virus.

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