Coughing, groaning and short of breath, elderly Covid patients crowded hospital corridors in Shanghai on Tuesday as a wave of Covid-19 cases spread across the Chinese megacity.
In two hospitals in the city, AFP reporters saw hundreds of patients, mostly elderly people, on gurneys in common areas as emergency wards were filled beyond capacity.
Swaddled in blankets, coats and woolen hats, many are attached to intravenous drips, heart monitors or oxygen tanks, and they seem to be struggling to breathe. Some seem unresponsive.
In one hospital, AFP witnessed an exchange between a woman and an older man, both dripping wet.
“I was here first,” he said. “I’m here to get a needle too.”
Beijing last month swiftly dismantled key pillars of its zero-Covid policy, lifting the country’s lockdown, mass testing and quarantine within days.
The reversal of the three-year hardline curve brought relief nationwide, but led to infections in the country’s health care system and overburdened funeral homes and crematoriums.
Even in Shanghai, one of China’s richest cities, the crisis is acute. About 70 percent of the megacity’s population – the equivalent of about 18 million people – may have caught Covid since last month, according to state media reports.
– Suffering in public –
In the waiting area of Huashan Hospital – located close to the site of anti-lockdown protests in November – a woman bent over an ailing man in his 80s, numerous tubes sticking out of his emaciated arms.
Nearby, a young man stood by the bed of another elderly patient, shielding him from the crowd of people walking past.
At Tongren Hospital in the western part of the city, a middle-aged woman wearing a face mask gently lifted a bottle to a man’s lips attached to an oxygen cylinder.
Nearby, a medical worker in blue scrubs and a face visor met a gray-haired woman in a red jumper as she shivered under a thick blanket.
Doctors and nurses at hospitals in several cities told AFP they continued to treat patients despite testing positive for the virus.
In Shanghai, many were also soldiers, letting out occasional dry coughs as they ran from patient to patient.
China’s National Health Commission last month announced it would no longer publish daily case figures, and a separate tally kept by the country’s disease control agency is considered inaccurate now that the testing mandate has been lifted.
The country also tightened the definition of what counts as a Covid death in a move that some experts say will underestimate the true number of fatalities from the disease.