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April 1, 2020

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Local medics return from Wuhan

By Yang Jian | 00:00 UTC+8 April 1, 2020 | Print Edition

A TOTAL of 780 Shanghai doctors and nurses returned home from Wuhan yesterday on three chartered flights. The returnees included medics from the city’s Huashan, Zhongshan and Ruijin hospitals and TCM practitioners.

“The 68-day experience in Wuhan will be engraved in my heart forever,” said Zheng Junhua, leader of the first Shanghai medical team and vice president of Shanghai General Hospital.

The team consisting of 135 doctors and nurses from 52 city and district-level hospitals assembled within three hours on Chinese New Year’s Eve on January 24, a day traditionally reserved for family reunions.

At Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital, which treated serious coronavirus cases, the Shanghai team was responsible for 170 patients, including 123 in serious condition. About 80 percent of the patients had recovered, with the recovery rate of those in serious condition being over 72 percent.

“The first 10 days were the darkest period, when many patients died,” said Zhou Xin, a senior respiratory expert at Shanghai General Hospital. To cope with the increasing number of patients, the team had to add 200 beds in the corridors.

“In the beginning, many patients brought in were suffering from pneumonia and respiratory failure as well as damage to heart, liver and spleen that posed great challenges to us,” Zhou said.

“It was like a real war. You can never imagine the horror of COVID-19 without entering the wards,” Zhou said.

Zha Qiongfang, a respiratory doctor at Shanghai Renji Hospital, kept a diary to relieve her mental stress.

“Whenever a patient died, I had to make the call to inform the family, which was the most depressing thing for me,” said Zha. She recorded every detail of her work in Wuhan. At times, she had to work continuously for 15 hours in a hazmat suit and could only get a few hours of sleep.

Jiang Jinjun, deputy director of the respiratory department at Shanghai Zhongshan Hospital, was lauded as an “inventor” at Jinyintan Hospital. He led a team to look after patients with dangerous conditions.

Jiang and his team developed an innovative “nose mask” to protect medical workers when they had to remove face masks to eat or drink.

Some of the Shanghai team members have published their experiences in Wuhan on professional medical websites. Their research papers have attracted tens of thousands of clicks and over 40 consultations from counterparts across the world, Zheng said.

Before returning home, the team members cleaned the wards and offices they had worked in. All their remaining medical supplies were donated to Jinyintan Hospital. The Wuhan hospital presented a jacket to each of the Shanghai medical team members.

China Eastern’s MU9004 flight carrying 264 medics left Wuhan at 2:15pm and landed at Hongqiao airport at 3:16pm. It was followed by Shanghai Airlines’ FM9012 and China Eastern’s MU9006.

After their return from Wuhan, 19 medics from the Pudong New Area will continue to work on coronavirus cases, most of them imported from abroad, in Shanghai.

“We’ve accumulated good experiences of fighting COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, so we agreed to join the fight in Shanghai after the end of our 14-day quarantine period,” said Zhao Yunfeng, head of the Pudong team and director of Punan Hospital’s respiratory department.

The Pudong medics have submitted a petition to the area’s health commission, which is under great pressure to screen and quarantine COVID-19 cases among a large number of inbound travelers at Pudong International Airport.

Nationwide, more than 7,000 medics returned to their hometowns from Hubei Province on 51 chartered flights yesterday, the largest retreat of medical workers from the former epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Over 32,000 doctors and nurses from all over China who helped to fight the pandemic in Hubei went home on a total of 235 chartered flights between March 17 and 31, the Civil Aviation Administration of China said.

None of the more than 40,000 medical workers — including 1,649 from Shanghai — dispatched to Hubei tested positive for the virus, said Ma Xiaowei, director of the National Health Commission.

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