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In China, the wave of Omicron infections has taken health services by surprise. Intensive care units are overcrowded, especially in the medium-sized cities of Hebei province, around Beijing. Report from Langfang hospital.
By Stéphane Lagarde, RFI correspondent in Beijing
Wheeled stretchers pushed with the energy of desperation, grave faces behind masks. For more than a month, the Langfang hospital has been fighting an epidemic that has taken the surrounding countryside by surprise. Cereals, vegetables and fruits were grown here when everyone suddenly fell ill. Due to lack of space, patients collapse in the corridors or lie on the floor. This relative accompanies a 79-year-old man who had to wait several days in the emergency room before being admitted.
“Of course it’s Covid-19,” he tells RFI. “Everyone here has caught it! We waited downstairs for three days. The doctors say the dead are old, but no one came to see us. Every time they told us: “There are no beds. If you don’t have contacts, don’t even think about coming here,” he emphasizes.
There are no beds without “guanxi” (“relations” in Chinese). All the rooms in the respiratory ward are occupied by six patients, including this 74-year-old grandmother, who can’t believe she’s still alive. “Last Friday I couldn’t open my eyes,” he says. “Walking between the living room and my room was impossible. My son first took me to the emergency room at the Popular Hospital, but there were so many people that we couldn’t even sit down. Then they did an X-ray of the lungs. They told me: ‘Your lungs have turned white, all parts are infected’. My little sister was scared when she saw this. I don’t know how she did it, but she found me a place here!”, she explains.
The terror of “white lungs”, a mark of the infection
This is how the infection manifests itself in the scans that flood social networks. Near the eighth floor elevators, makeshift cots allow the most tired to rest or cry. Suddenly, a stretcher goes through the swing doors in the direction of the emergency room with a new patient. “My father is 74 years old. This time he is too sick. His lungs are white. I have seen other patients on the ward who also have white lungs. But with milder symptoms, it is possible to overcome it. In this case, we don’t know. They took him away, but the doctors say that nothing is certain. We haven’t told mom,” confesses the patient’s daughter, who has just seen her father leave on a stretcher.
Nothing is certain with this first epidemic, whose epicenter was the Hebei region in mid-December. Today, the youngest have recovered and normal life has resumed, says the propaganda. But not at the hospital, where the elderly, in critical condition, continue to flock. “People are coming from neighboring counties,” says a head nurse. “The hospital is still under pressure and you have to take a number in the queue if you hope to get a bed. Many old people have died. We are all doing everything we can to save them, but their “Bodies are too weak to fight this virus. It’s actually a disease that decimates older aunts and uncles. And it’s very expensive to stay in intensive care.”
Hospitalization costs are unaffordable for most families. The same goes for funerals; here, too, the fees for crematoriums overwhelmed by this “white lung” epidemic have increased. An epidemic that, officially, causes few or no victims.
