Chinese doctor’s intense 21 days at coronavirus clinic treating over 200 patients
For over a month now, Fan spends her non-working hours in quarantined isolation – away from her husband and daughter in Wuhan and her critically ill mother in another locked-down city in Hubei province in central China.
For Dr. Fan Hong, the 21 days as the head of one of the first frontline fever clinics set up to screen Covid-19 patients at outbreak ground zero Wuhan were the most intense three weeks in her 32-year career.
At the end of it – after treating more than 200 severe and critically ill patients with her team -- she transferred out of the fever clinic at the Wuhan Union Medical College (WUMC) hospital physically exhausted and emotionally rattled. She spent 10-12 hours daily at the fever clinic for those 21 days.
For over a month now, Fan spends her non-working hours in quarantined isolation – away from her husband and daughter in Wuhan and her critically ill mother in another locked-down city in Hubei province in central China.
Fan, 54, doesn’t clearly remember what she was doing when she was informed that her diabetic mother had to be rushed to a hospital ICU in Huanggang city, some 70 km from Wuhan, in January.
“Maybe I was in the clinic, maybe I was in quarantine”.
Fan’s sleep at the indifferent quarantined hotel room in Wuhan is hostage to the recurring flashes in her mind of lines of patients slumped outside the clinic who she could not admit or treat because of a lack of beds.
There were times, she simply sobbed
In a rare, government-sanctioned interview, Fan spoke to HT over phone and WeChat, sharing her experience in a mellow, tired voice through a translator.
As the deputy director of the emergency department at the WUMC hospital, Fan was fully responsible for running the newly formed fever clinic.
It wasn’t easy.
“On the one hand, we lacked the medical staff, on the other hand, we lacked the space (for) treating the people. We lacked places. At that time, we had opened only a limited number of medical institutions for treating covid-19,” she said.
“So, we didn’t have enough hospitals. And also we did not have enough medical staff. I am not saying that in my department we needed more hands but because the hospital area is so limited, we needed to expand the hospital area, and we needed more hands,” Fan, also a visiting scholar at the US’s Utah university’s school of medicine, said.
The doctor remembered an infected man in his 40s who died; his father and wife were also infected, one of the first “family cluster” cases, Fan dealt with.
“When we received him, he was in a severe condition. We put him on a ventilator. Sadly, he passed away. I was very sad about the case”.
Fan and her team of 19 doctors and 30 nurses were luckier than many other medics.
As frontline medics working at the very first level of infection screening, they did not face any critical shortage of protective clothing.
“Because we were at the very frontline, so the medical supplies were directed to us,” Fan said, adding that no medic in her team was infected.
The senior doctor’s response was both guarded and revealing when asked about Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower doctor, reprimanded by the police for sharing news of the outbreak on social media, who later died of the infection.
“Li Wenliang was an ordinary clinical doctor. When he found out about this disease, he warned a group of people. He did this out of a doctor’s sharpness and conscience. I think he did what he should have done,” Fan said.