Patients in Beijing who have recovered from SARS are angry the government reacted too slowly to the outbreak and criticized the city's hospitals for a lack of preparedness in treating the disease.
With up to 70 percent of SARS patients in Beijing having no known previous contact with another infected person, experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) have long held that many were infected in hospitals which had inadequate infectious disease controls.
PHOTO: AFP
Jiang Guowei, 41, who contracted SARS in mid-April after visiting her ailing mother in a Beijing hospital, blamed the government for failing to grasp the seriousness of the epidemic after it first appeared in southern Guangdong in November.
It took until mid-April, during the peak infection period in Beijing -- the world's worst hit city by SARS -- to order stringent control efforts to stop the spread of the disease.
"Everyone knew it was very sudden, that it was a sudden disease, but the [government] directive [to fight the disease] came out too late," Jiang said.
"Ordinary people knew how serious it was, but the directive came too late, if we would have known how bad it was we wouldn't have gone to hospital and it wouldn't have been so bad," she said.
Eventually 10 people in Jiang's family came down with SARS, with her mother dying, despite being hospitalized for a heart condition.
There has been over 2,520 SARS cases in Beijing leading to 190 deaths, while nationwide 5,326 SARS cases and 346 fatalities have been recorded.
"There was no preparation in the hospital, the hospital was in a mess and the hospital administration was no good," said Yang Zainan, who got SARS after visiting her grandmother who was hospitalized for diabetes and high blood pressure in mid-April.
Eight people in Yang's family came down with SARS. Her grandmother died although her father and grandfather survived the epidemic.
"The hospital was not good at all, I think that their administration was not very strict so a lot of people got SARS this way," she said.
Yang, 21, however said she did not want to blame anyone for her family's ordeal.
"You can't blame others now," she said. "Except my grandmother, everyone recovered and are fine."
Jiang Guowei said that when she came down with a fever on April 23 she went to three Beijing hospitals and was told each time that she just had a bad case of the flu.
By April 27, as her fever rose, she was diagnosed with pneumonia, given an intravenous drip and told to come back in three days.
But by April 29, after her sister and sister-in-law also came down with fevers she was given a chest X-ray at the capital's Chaoyang hospital and pronounced as a probable SARS case with her two relatives.
Jiang said she had no idea if she had spread SARS to any of the people that she had come in contact with during her visits to hospitals.
"In the early phase of the epidemic, the scenario of a patient hospitalized for non-SARS related illnesses contracting SARS in hospital has occurred in Hong Kong, Toronto as well as here in Beijing," Daniel Feikin, a WHO consultant presently in Beijing, said.
THE ‘MONSTER’: The Philippines on Saturday sent a vessel to confront a 12,000-tonne Chinese ship that had entered its exclusive economic zone The Philippines yesterday said it deployed a coast guard ship to challenge Chinese patrol boats attempting to “alter the existing status quo” of the disputed South China Sea. Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said Chinese patrol ships had this year come as close as 60 nautical miles (111km) west of the main Philippine island of Luzon. “Their goal is to normalize such deployments, and if these actions go unnoticed and unchallenged, it will enable them to alter the existing status quo,” he said in a statement. He later told reporters that Manila had deployed a coast guard ship to the area
RISING TENSIONS: The nations’ three leaders discussed China’s ‘dangerous and unlawful behavior in the South China Sea,’ and agreed on the importance of continued coordination Japan, the Philippines and the US vowed to further deepen cooperation under a trilateral arrangement in the face of rising tensions in Asia’s waters, the three nations said following a call among their leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and outgoing US President Joe Biden met via videoconference on Monday morning. Marcos’ communications office said the leaders “agreed to enhance and deepen economic, maritime and technology cooperation.” The call followed a first-of-its-kind summit meeting of Marcos, Biden and then-Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida in Washington in April last year that led to a vow to uphold international
US president-elect Donald Trump is not typically known for his calm or reserve, but in a craftsman’s workshop in rural China he sits in divine contemplation. Cross-legged with his eyes half-closed in a pose evoking the Buddha, this porcelain version of the divisive US leader-in-waiting is the work of designer and sculptor Hong Jinshi (洪金世). The Zen-like figures — which Hong sells for between 999 and 20,000 yuan (US$136 to US$2,728) depending on their size — first went viral in 2021 on the e-commerce platform Taobao, attracting national headlines. Ahead of the real-estate magnate’s inauguration for a second term on Monday next week,
‘PLAINLY ERRONEOUS’: The justice department appealed a Trump-appointed judge’s blocking of the release of a report into election interference by the incoming president US Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the federal cases against US president-elect Donald Trump on charges of trying to overturn his 2020 election defeat and mishandling of classified documents, has resigned after submitting his investigative report on Trump, an expected move that came amid legal wrangling over how much of that document can be made public in the days ahead. The US Department of Justice disclosed Smith’s departure in a footnote of a court filing on Saturday, saying he had resigned one day earlier. The resignation, 10 days before Trump is inaugurated, follows the conclusion of two unsuccessful criminal prosecutions
RSS