The terror of the “white lungs”: the testimonies of a Chinese hospital overwhelmed by Covid

Wheeled stretchers pushed with the energy of desperation, serious faces behind the masks. For more than a month, Langfang Hospital in China has been battling an epidemic that has taken the rural environment by surprise. When cereals, vegetables and fruit were grown here suddenly everyone fell ill.

For lack of spacepatients collapse in corridors or lie down on the ground. A relative accompanies a 79-year-old man who had to wait several days in the emergency room before being admitted.

“Of course it’s Covid-19 – he tells Rfi – everyone here got it! We waited downstairs for three days. The doctors say that the dead are old, but no one came to visit us. Every time they said:”. There are no beds, if you have no contacts don’t even think about coming here », he underlines.

Each room in the respiratory care ward is occupied by six patients, including a 74-year-old grandmother, who can’t believe she’s still alive.

“Last Friday I couldn’t open my eyes – he says – It was impossible to walk between the living room and my room. My son took me first to the emergency room of the People’s Hospital, but there were so many people that we couldn’t even sit down. Then they did an x-ray of the lungs.They told me: “Your lungs have turned white, all parts are infected”. My little sister freaked out when she saw this. I don’t know how she did it, but she found me a place here!” she explains.

Signs of infection

White lungs. This is how the contagion manifests itself in the scans that flood social media, while the wave of Covid 19 worsens in China. Near the elevators on the eighth floor, about cradles of luck they allow the most tired to rest or cry.

Suddenly, a stretcher comes through the swing doors in the direction of the emergency room with a new patient. “My father is 74 years old. This time he is too sick. His lungs are white. I have seen other patients on the ward who also have white lungs. But with milder symptoms, it is possible to overcome it. In this case, we don’t know. They took him away, but the doctors say nothing is certain. We haven’t told the mother,” confesses the patient’s daughter, who has just seen her father leave on a stretcher.

nothing is certain with this epidemic, the epicenter of which was the Hebei region in mid-December.

Today, the little ones recovered and normal life resumed, the propaganda says. But not in the hospital, where the elderly, in critical condition, continue to flow.

“People are coming from neighboring counties,” says a matron, “the hospital is still under pressure and you have to dial a number in the queue if you hope to find a bed. Many elderly people have died. We are all doing everything we can to save them, but their “bodies are too weak to fight this virus. It’s actually a disease that decimates older aunts and uncles. And it’s very expensive to be in the ICU,” she notes.

Hospitalization costs are unaffordable for most families.

The same goes for funerals; here too the tariffs of the crematoria overwhelmed by this epidemic of “white lung” have increased. An epidemic that, officially, takes few or no victims.

Source: RFI

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