“It’s always the same profile,” she said. “That’s why most patients haven’t been vaccinated.”
He said patients and their relatives go to the raffles because local hospitals are “overwhelmed”, and because they want to buy Paxlovid, the Pfizer-made COVID treatment, which is running low in many places, including the raffles.
“They want the drug to be like a replacement for the vaccine, but the drug doesn’t take the place of the vaccine,” Jutard-Boureau said.
Jutard-Boureau, who, like Bernstein, has been working in China for nearly a decade fears that the worst of this wave in Beijing is yet to come.
Elsewhere in China, medical staff said resources have already been stretched to breaking point in some cases, as COVID and illness levels among staff have been particularly high.
A nurse based in the western city of Xian said 45 of the 51 nurses in her department and all emergency department staff have caught the virus in recent weeks.
“There are too many positive cases among my colleagues,” said a 22-year-old nurse surnamed Wang. “Almost all doctors are down with it.”
Wang and nurses at other hospitals said they were told to report for duty even if they tested positive and had a mild fever.
Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse in a psychiatric ward at a hospital in Hubei province, said staff attendance at her ward had dropped by more than 50 percent, having stopped accepting new patients. She said she has been working shifts of more than 16 hours with inadequate support.
“I worry that if the patient appears agitated, you have to restrain him, but you can’t do that easily alone,” she said. “It’s not a great situation to be in.”
Mortality “Political”
Doctors said they were most concerned about the elderly, thousands of whom could die, according to experts’ estimates.
More than 5,000 people are dying every day from COVID-19 in China, estimates UK-based health data firm Airfinity, offering a dramatic contrast to Beijing’s official figures on the country’s current outbreak.