Shanghai Hospital Grapples With Unreported COVID-19 Outbreak, Patient Alleges

A worker wearing protective gear stands next to barriers during lockdown in Jing'an district, Shanghai, on March 31, 2022. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

A suspected wave of COVID-19 infections has hit local Shanghai hospitals as the country grapples with a record coronavirus surge, the severity of which has been hidden from hospital workers and local authorities, The Epoch Times has learned.

In the past few days, Shanghai and China’s northeastern province of Jilin accounted for more than 95 percent of new infections across the mainland, with Shanghai seeing record highs. Local health officials announced on April 3 that 19 hospitals in Shanghai have partially suspended medical services because they were overflowing with COVID-19 patients.

A 70-year-old critical care unit inpatient, who was recently transferred to the city’s Yangsi Hospital, hasn’t been given the potassium he needs and is in critical condition, according to his family members. The man is now relying on six tablets a day to supply the potassium with no fruit or vegetable intake.

“There is no longer a nutritional supply for those who are critically ill,” said his son, who preferred to remain unnamed. “My father had a heart attack, which led to a lung infection.”

He told the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times on April 3 that Yangsi Hospital was put under lockdown, with people, including doctors, nurses, caregivers, patients, and accompaniers, confined to their own levels.

“I’ve heard of confirmed cases merged from the first, second, fourth, and fifth levels, but I alone cannot prove it.”

The Epoch Times contacted Shanghai Yangsi Hospital that day; a doctor who answered the phone confirmed the lockdown but said he was barred from knowing how serious the outbreak was.

“I’m one of the staff here, but even I do not know how many [new infections] there are in the hospital, and it’s not proper for me to ask, either.”

Health workers wearing protective gear prepare equipment in preparation for testing people for the COVID-19 coronavirus at a compound in Shanghai on March 23, 2022. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images

The son said efforts to contact local authorities have led nowhere, and his post pleading for help on China’s Twitter-like site Weibo was quickly censored and removed from the platform.

“I was just confused that many efforts got wasted on this [rather than what truly matters],” he said.

“[My father’s] life and death now lie in the lap of the gods.”

30 Cases Underreported

A patient revealed that another Shanghai hospital had concealed the extent of its current COVID-19 outbreak from authorities.

Wei Yan (pseudonym), said that at least 30 elderly people in Shanghai Tongkang Hospital had tested positive for COVID-19 as of April 1. She later found the outbreak numbers to have been underreported upon checking with local authorities.

The hospital is seeing a serious shortage of nursing workers as many have been pulled away. Worrying about her 95-year-old hospitalized grandmother, Wei decided to go to Tongkang Hospital as a volunteer, but the hospital later rejected her help, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) of Shanghai.

“The hospital did not report the outbreak at all,” she told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times on April 2, following a fact check with the Shanghai center. “No one at the CDPC knew there were positive cases in this hospital before I reported [them].”

The Epoch Times repeatedly called Shanghai Tongkang Hospital for comment, but the calls went unanswered. Wei said that patients and their families, and even workers in the hospital were uninformed of what was happening due to the cover-up.

Shanghai reported a city record of over 9,000 COVID-19 cases on April 3, compared to 8,226 cases a day earlier.

The current two-stage lockdown in the financial hub, which began on March 28, has massively disrupted daily life and business operations. While it was initially scheduled to end at 5 a.m. local time on April 5, authorities said on April 4 that the city will remain under lockdown, as the military and 2,000 health care workers have been dispatched to Shanghai to help test all of its 26 million residents for COVID-19.

Gu Xiaohua and Gao Miao contributed to this report.