Wuhan emergency medical workers face unpredictable, risky obstacles
Updated 19:00, 08-Feb-2020
By Tang Bo
02:37

As more and more coronavirus cases emerge, downtown Wuhan alone has over 80 emergency stations, which are busy day and night. It's an equally busy task for their medics, who need to pick up and send people to hospitals, some of which can't take new patients.

Song Hong, a doctor at Wuhan Emergency Medical Center was assigned to pick up a patient claiming to have heart disease. The old lady and her husband live alone in their apartment since their daughter is not with them due to the isolation quarantine.

The daughter made the emergency call when her mother went unconscious due to heart disease. But the medical workers found out that the patient had had a fever for three days.

There has been an increasing number of infected patients in Wuhan, leading to overcrowded hospitals and cases in which those hospitals refuse to take in more patients. So medics need to negotiate. The old lady was lucky that she was taken by the Wuhan Union Hospital.

Song didn't put on her protective gear when she was checking the patient. It was too late to put it on since she had already made physical contact with the patient. Therefore, she had to thoroughly disinfect herself afterward.

Song and her colleagues have become used to working with insufficient protection. She stressed that there is nothing to be afraid of as long as they take proper safety measures.

Her main concern was to send the patient to the hospital as soon as possible for isolation and treatment, because by doing that they can keep the infection sources under control.