Saturday December 24, 2022 | 9:00 p.m.
In a hospital overwhelmed by the wave of covid-19, a nurse hands out a death certificate. Three years after the first cases of coronavirus appeared, China has been facing an outbreak of infections since the lifting of much of the health restrictions in early December.
In Chongqing, a large southwestern city in the Asian country, the corridor of Hospital No. 5 has been turned into a makeshift ward for coronavirus patients only, AFP found.
A red and white ribbon delimits the space where a dozen patients, mostly elderly, are with intravenous fluids, lying on their beds.
According to official media reports, an adjoining room with about 40 people are waiting on sofas or stretchers to receive treatment, while some others are coughing.
Mass infections of Covid-19
Half a million people are infected with Covid-19 every day in a Chinese city, a local health authority has reported, a rare acknowledgment of the wave of infections that do not appear in official statistics.
A nurse assures that all have tested positive for covid-19.
In a nearby intensive care unit, three patients are receiving respiratory support and doctors are monitoring their heart function.
Meanwhile, about fifty people line up at the emergency door. One of them told AFP that she had been waiting for more than an hour.
In another more modest medical center in Chongqing, a city of more than 30 million inhabitants, some thirty elderly people crowd into the emergency room.
In the first hospital visited by the AFP, an employee and a nurse have recorded several deaths per day since the sanitary restrictions were lifted two weeks ago.
Even so, they do not know if the main cause is the covid.
“Look, this old man has just died,” laments a worker, while pointing to the empty bed where he had been moments before.
Mortality numbers in the elderly increase massively
This unprecedented explosion of covid cases in China has generated fears that there is a high mortality among the elderly, who are especially vulnerable and who are also less vaccinated.
At a crematorium in southern Chongqing, forty bodies arrived in a two-hour interval on Thursday, an AFP team found.
The link with the covid is difficult to establish, but many people close to the deceased suspect that they were infected.
A woman claims that her father, these are symptoms of a cold, passed away before the ambulance arrived.
Another person in his 20s attributes his father’s death to covid. The man did not take the test, since it is no longer mandatory.
At the other end of the country, a similar scenario was recorded on Friday.
1,500 km from Chongqing, patients on respiratory support crowded the corridors of a Shanghai hospital. Some relatives accompanied them in the midst of a chaotic environment, the AFP observed.
Since the restrictions were lifted, the Chinese authorities have only officially reported six deaths from covid.
Earlier in the week, they introduced a new methodology for recounting victims. Now, only people who died directly from respiratory failure linked to the virus will be counted in the statistics.
