Covid Now Spread Feeely In China

China’s hospitals were already overcrowded, underfunded and inadequately staffed in the best of times. But with Covid now spreading freely in China, the medical system is being pushed to its limits, with patients lining the walls of corridors and emergency departments left exhausted. Health workers on the front lines are also battling rampant infections within their own ranks. In some hospitals, so many have tested positive for the virus that the remaining few who haven’t say that they are forced to do the job of five or more co-workers. To ensure that enough staff members are on the floor, some facilities have given up requiring doctors and nurses to test themselves before work. One doctor in the central city of Wuhan said her hospital’s staff had been so depleted that a neurosurgeon in her department recently had to perform two operations in one day while fighting symptoms of Covid. The actual scale of China’s health emergency has been difficult to gauge. But data released by local authorities suggests the virus is running rampant, with reports from several cities and provinces of hundreds of thousands of infections recorded daily. In Shanghai, one hospital predicted that half of the city’s 25 million residents would eventually be infected.