One month after makeshift hospitals opened to chaos and confusion at the epicenter of China’s COVID-19 outbreak, frontline doctor Ma Yonggang (馬永剛) is finally seeing more empty beds as fewer patients arrive.
When 43-year-old Ma was first summoned to a sports stadium converted into a medical facility on Feb. 4, it was a construction site with electrical wiring and beds still being installed.
Separated from his wife and young child, who returned to Shandong Province for the Lunar New Year holiday, Ma said that he felt “scared and anxious” when a call from the jury-rigged Wuhan Wuchang Hospital came in the middle of the night.
Photo: AFP
However, the situation has slowly improved, with the number of patients receiving treatment in the improvised hospital declining from a high of 760 in the middle of last month to 320 earlier this week.
“We had 30 to 40 patients being discharged per day, but the number of patients admitted was only a dozen or so. This was when the whole situation changed for us,” Ma, who is the hospital’s deputy director, told reporters in a video call from Wuhan. “Now, we admit very few new patients and about three to four recovered patients are discharged each day.”
The situation that Ma described tallies with officials’ accounts of a slowdown in new infections in Wuhan, but it was not always like this.
Reporters saw people standing in line for hours to see doctors in Wuhan’s hospitals during the first weeks of the crisis, when the facilities lacked enough beds for the thousands of new patients.
Hastily converted from sports stadiums, schools and cultural venues, Wuhan’s 16 makeshift “ark” hospitals were designed to ease the burden on the city’s overstretched healthcare system.
However, in the early stages of the outbreak, they also suffered from the same widespread shortages of medical protective supplies as the city’s designated hospitals, Ma said.
“When the hospital was opened, the facilities were only for controlling the outbreak, so the living conditions for patients and medical staff ... were quite bad,” he said in the interview arranged by the Chinese State Council Information Office. “Now, the conditions have improved a lot, for example now we have patient exercise areas and bathrooms, and we have indoor heating and catering services.”
Ma said that conditions fell short of patients’ expectations and those hoping for small rooms to themselves were not prepared for the open-plan layout of the makeshift hospital.
“Once they arrived, they realized that there were several patients in a large open room and began to doubt whether they could be treated successfully,” he said.
Chinese health authorities and a team of WHO experts have said that at least 3,000 Chinese medical workers have caught the virus — mostly in Wuhan — and at least 11 have lost their lives, but Ma said that none of the medical workers at the city’s makeshift hospitals have been infected.
One of the latest victims was Li’s colleague, Mei Zhongming (梅仲明), who was deputy director of the ophthalmology department at the central hospital and died from the virus on Tuesday.
While Ma said he was nervous about the possibility of infection, he remains committed to his duties.
“As Wuhan medical workers, this historic responsibility has fallen on our shoulders,” he said.
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