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Gallery|Coronavirus pandemic

Photos: How COVID roils small Chinese towns

With intensive care units overwhelmed, patients are forced to go to bigger cities for treatment.

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COVID-19 patients lie on hospital beds in the cordoned-off lobby of the Chongqing No 5 People's Hospital in China's southwestern city of Chongqing. [Noel Celis/AFP]
Published On 24 Dec 202224 Dec 2022
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As China grapples with surging COVID-19 cases, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of the capital, Beijing, are overwhelmed. Intensive care units (ICUs) are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds, and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors for a lack of beds.

The towns and small cities in Baoding and Langfang prefectures, in central Hebei province, were the epicentre of one of China’s first outbreaks after the state loosened coronavirus controls in November and December. For weeks, the region went quiet, as people fell ill and stayed home.

Many have now recovered. Today, markets are bustling, diners pack restaurants and cars are honking in snarling traffic, even as the virus is spreading in other parts of China. In recent days, headlines in state media said the area is “starting to resume normal life”.

But life in central Hebei’s emergency wards and crematoriums is anything but normal. Even as the young go back to work and lines at fever clinics shrink, many of Hebei’s elderly are falling into critical condition. As they overrun ICUs and funeral homes, it could be a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of China.

The Chinese government has reported only seven COVID-19 deaths since restrictions were loosened dramatically on December 7, bringing the country’s total toll to 5,241. On Tuesday, a health official said China counts deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure only in its official COVID-19 death toll, a narrow definition that excludes many deaths that would be attributed to the disease in other places.

Experts have forecast between a million and 2 million deaths in China next year, and the World Health Organization warned that Beijing’s way of counting would “underestimate the true death toll”.

At Baoding No 2 Hospital, in Zhuozhou, patients on Wednesday thronged the hallway of the emergency ward. Others were breathing with the help of respirators. One woman wailed after doctors told her that a loved one had died.

At the Zhuozhou crematorium, furnaces are burning overtime as workers struggle to cope with a spike in deaths in the past week, according to one employee cited by The Associated Press news agency. A funeral shop worker estimated it is burning 20 to 30 bodies a day, up from three to four before COVID-19 measures were loosened.

At a crematorium in Gaobeidian, about 20km (12 miles) south of Zhuozhou, the body of one 82-year-old woman was brought from Beijing, a two-hour drive, because funeral homes in China’s capital were packed, according to the woman’s grandson, Liang.

“They said we’d have to wait for 10 days,” Liang said, giving only his surname because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Liang’s grandmother had been unvaccinated, Liang added, when she came down with coronavirus symptoms, and had spent her final days hooked to a respirator in a Beijing ICU.

The Baigou New Area Aerospace Hospital was quiet and orderly, with empty beds and short lines as nurses sprayed disinfectant. COVID-19 patients are separated from others, staff said, to prevent cross-infection. But they added that serious cases are being directed to hospitals in bigger cities, because of limited medical equipment.

The lack of ICU capacity in Baigou, which has about 60,000 residents, reflects a nationwide problem. Experts say medical resources in China’s villages and towns, home to about 500 million of China’s 1.4 billion people, lag far behind those of big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Some counties lack a single ICU bed.

As a result, patients in critical condition are forced to go to bigger cities for treatment.

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An ambulance prepares to transfer a patient in critical care to another hospital due to overcapacity at the emergency department of the Langfang No 4 People's Hospital in Bazhou city in northern Hebei province. As China grapples with the surging COVID mass infections, emergency wards in the towns and cities to Beijing's southwest are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, residents are driving sick relatives from hospital to hospital, and patients are lying on floors due to a lack of space. [AP Photo]
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COVID-19 patients on stretchers in the emergency ward of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University in the southwestern city of Chongqing. [Noel Celis/AFP]
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A worker in protective gear attends to visitors at the emergency department of the Langfang No 4 People's Hospital. [AP Photo]
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A man pulls a cloth to cover up the face of an elderly woman whose vitals flatlined as emotional relatives gather silently around her for a final farewell before her body is taken away at the emergency department of the Langfang No 4 People's Hospital. [AP Photo]
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A man holds a wreath of flowers at a crematorium in Beijing. Hospitals are struggling, pharmacy shelves have been stripped bare, and many crematoriums are overwhelmed in the wake of the government's sudden decision to lift years of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing. [AFP]
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A hospital worker prepares to perform tests after placing electrodes on a man's chest sprawled out on a stretcher outside the emergency ward at the Langfang No 4 People's Hospital. [AP Photo]
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Relatives gather near the beds of sickened patients at the emergency department of the Langfang No 4 People's Hospital. [/Dake KangAP Photo]
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A hospital worker in protective gear disinfects the ward of an emergency department of Baigou New Area Aerospace Hospital in Baigou. [AP Photo]
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People wait for medical attention at the fever clinic area in Tongren Hospital in the Changning district in Shanghai. [Hector Retamal/AFP]
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China is battling a wave of coronavirus infections that has hit the elderly hard but resulted in only a handful of reported deaths after the government redefined the criteria by which COVID-19 deaths are counted. [AP Photo]
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A health worker takes a swab sample from a woman to test for COVID-19 in the Jing'an district of Shanghai. [Hector Retamal/AFP]
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A worshipper wearing a protective mask at the Buddhist Jing'an Temple. [Aly Song/Reuters]
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A man wearing a protective mask holds a picture frame of a loved one outside a funeral home in Shanghai. [Aly Song/Reuters]
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Family members light fireworks as offerings for their deceased relative at the Gaobeidian Funeral Home in Hebei. Bodies from Beijing, a two-hour drive away, are appearing at the Gaobeidian funeral home because similar funeral homes in the capital were packed. [AP Photo]


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