As China grapples with its first-ever national Covid wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed. Intensive care units 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.
On Tuesday, a Chinese health official said that China only counts deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its official Covid death toll, a narrow definition that excludes many deaths that would be attributed to Covid 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, Wednesday, patients thronged the hallway of the emergency ward. Patients were breathing with the help of respirators. One woman wailed after doctors told her that a loved one had died.
The ICU was so crowded, ambulances were turned away.