![]() People walk along a street in Fengyang County in east China’s Anhui Province on January 5, 2023. Overloaded clinics were ordered to send elderly patients with severe symptoms to larger city hospitals for better care, he said. The sick, he said, “had to line up outside” the building as the tiny waiting room was full.Īnd in a nearby town, the head of a small health centre said medicine supplies became “so badly depleted that we had to suspend prescriptions”. One doctor told AFP he was forced to work 14-hour days in December, when his two-room village clinic was inundated with up to 10 times more patients than usual. “Things were better when the government kept us all locked down.” “It’s been a total mess,” he told AFP as he pulled on a cigarette. “Nobody tested for it, so we didn’t know if we were positive or not,” said Shao from a village near Bengbu, a city of 3.3 million people. When the Covid wave hit in the second half of December, doctors in Anhui rapidly ran out of diagnostic kits and treatments. Since China reversed its zero-Covid policy last month, a whirlwind of cases has crammed hospitals with elderly patients and sparked a free-for-all over limited supplies of medicine.Īnd the country’s wide wealth gap has fuelled healthcare disparities between cities and rural areas, with underdeveloped regions seeing a chronic lack of doctors, equipment and expertise. ![]() ![]() Patients with Covid-19 coronavirus rest in beds at Fengyang People’s Hospital in Fengyang County in east China’s Anhui Province on January 5, 2023. 'Total mess' in China's rural east as Covid wave hits hard - Hong Kong Free Press HKFP Close
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