Wuhan residents face long waits for medical help

WUHAN • Weak with fever, Ms An Jianhua waited in a queue for seven hours outside the hospital in the cold hoping to get tested for the coronavirus, which doctors suspected she had contracted.

Ms An, 67, needed an official diagnosis from a hospital to qualify for treatment, but the one she and her son raced to last week had no space, even to test her.

The next hospital they were referred to in Wuhan, the city of 11 million people at the centre of the outbreak, was full too, they said. They finally got an intravenous drip for Ms An's fever, but that was all.

Since then, Ms An has quarantined herself at home. She and her son eat separately, wear masks at home and are constantly disinfecting their apartment. Ms An's health is declining rapidly, and even keeping water down is a struggle.

"I can't let my mum die at home," said her son He Jun. "Every day, I want to cry, but when I cry, there are no tears. There is no hope."

Residents of Wuhan, the provincial capital of central China's Hubei province, are waging a daily battle to survive the outbreak that has sickened more than 4,100 people and killed at least 224 in their city alone.

Last month, the government put Wuhan in a virtual lockdown, sealing off the city and banning most public transportation and private cars from its streets in a desperate effort to contain the outbreak. Now, many residents have said it is nearly impossible to get the health care they need to treat - or even diagnose - the coronavirus.

Expressing exasperation, doctors said there is a shortage of testing kits and other medical supplies, and it is not clear why more are not available.

The ban on transportation means some residents have to walk for hours to get to hospitals - if they are well enough to make the journey.

Layers of bureaucracy stand between residents and help. And the long queues outside hospitals for testing and treatment suggest that the outbreak is spreading far beyond the official count of cases.

Ambulances, too, are hard to come by, residents said. In recent days, some said, they have called 120 - China's equivalent of the emergency number 911 - only to be told that there were already hundreds of people in the queue.

Those who have made it to the hospital said they have been squeezed together for hours in waiting rooms, where infections are easily spread. But the shortages have meant that many are ultimately turned away and sent home to self-quarantine, potentially compounding the outbreak by exposing their families.

Many doctors and residents are putting their hopes on the two new coronavirus hospitals that China has raced to build in Wuhan in just a matter of days.

On Sunday, city officials announced plans to set up quarantine stations around Wuhan for people with symptoms of pneumonia and close contacts among coronavirus patients.

"The situation that we have seen is much worse than what has been officially reported," Mr Long Jian, 32, said outside a hospital where his elderly father was being treated. Mr Long said his father had to go to six hospitals and waited seven days before he could even be tested for the coronavirus.

Just steps from where Mr Long spoke, beds could be seen lining both sides of a narrow corridor in the emergency room. One man was getting an intravenous drip outside in his car.

"Those who can get diagnosed and treated are the lucky ones," Mr Long said. "In our neighbourhood, many who were not able to get diagnosed ended up dying at home."

Getting treatment for the coronavirus in a hospital requires jumping through a number of hoops.

According to official guidelines, patients are encouraged to go to their local hospitals first for initial assessments and sometimes prescriptions. Then, patients are to deliver the results to their local neighbourhood committees, which are responsible for communicating with the hospitals and coordinating resources for the households in their areas. There are about 1,000 neighbourhood committees in Wuhan for a population of 11 million.

Patients with mild symptoms are typically told to go home and self-quarantine, according to a Jan 24 notice by city officials. Those who have more severe symptoms are flagged by neighbourhood committees, which arrange for transportation by ambulance to one of the two dozen or so hospitals designated for treating the coronavirus.

But in practice, patients and their relatives said that the process takes far too long and that the bar for what constitutes severe symptoms has been set too high - so they give up and try waiting in long queues at hospitals instead.

Mr Gan Hanjiang's father came down with a severe fever and cough last month. He was tested for the coronavirus, but the results were negative. Ten days after the onset of symptoms, however, his father died, Mr Gan said.

The hospital classified the cause as "severe pneumonia", Mr Gan said, but he believes it was the coronavirus. Several experts have recently conceded that several rounds of testing may be needed for an accurate diagnosis of the virus.

On the day his father died, Mr Gan began to show the same symptoms, he said. But without a car, he has not been able to go to one of the designated hospitals to get tested for the coronavirus.

"Getting treatment is so difficult," he whispered slowly by telephone from a small hospital near his home, where he was being treated for viral pneumonia. "We can't get admitted to the hospitals. And there is not enough medicine."

NYTIMES