CHONGQING: Elderly patients lined the wards of hospitals in major cities in China on Thursday as the country battled a wave of Covid cases.

The virus is surging across China in an outbreak authorities say is impossible to track after the end of mandatory mass testing.

Attached to a breathing tube under a pile of blankets, an old man racked with Covid-19 lay groaning on a stretcher in the emergency department of a hospital in central China.

A paramedic at Chongqing Medical University First Affiliated Hospital, who confirmed the old man was a Covid patient, said he had picked up more than 10 people a day, 80 to 90 percent of whom were infected with coronavirus. “Most of them are elderly people,” he said.

“A lot of hospital staff are positive as well, but we have no choice but to carry on working.”

Millions of elderly people across China are still not fully vaccinated, raising concerns that the virus may kill the most vulnerable citizens in huge numbers. Under new government guidelines, however, many of those deaths would not be blamed on Covid. In Shanghai, the corridors of an emergency department were lined with stretchers filled with elderly people hooked up to oxygen tanks.

A reporter counted at least 15 such patients spilling out from the wards into the hallway, some with suitcases next to their trolleys. Swaddled in colourful duvets, they wheezed weakly through their masks as medical workers attended to them. Many appeared mostly unresponsive.

At a large crematorium on the rural outskirts of Chongqing, a long line of cars waited for parking spaces inside the compound on Thursday afternoon.

Dozens of bereaved relatives milled around in groups, some carrying wooden urns, as funeral gongs sounded and mourners burned incense.

Published in Dawn, December 23rd, 2022