Dear Professor XXX:
Thank you for your reply and encouragement. During the week since we communicated the situation in the city of Wuhan has turned much worse. Now it's getting to the magnitude of a disaster.
- The under-reporting continues. From the messages of patient's family on the Chinese version of twitter many hospitals have quotas each day to test potential infected individuals. People coming later were turned back. The result is a large number of undiagnosed persons not get treated and still moving around the city.
- The hospital resources are exhausted. The city of 10 million regularly has about 50k beds. It committed about 7000 to diagnosed or suspected persons and they are all full. Yesterday it mobilized another 2500 beds, including beds from some small community hospitals which have no training to handle contagious diseases. Two temp structures are being built to house another 2000 and should be operational in a few days. But we are getting thousands more cases each day.
- The hospital personells are exhausted and many are infected due to insufficient protective gears.
- The city is running low on food and supplies. The army delivered 200 tons of food yesterday, 40 grams for each citizen.
- The city extended business hours for the crematories from 8 hours a day to 24 hours a day. Deceased person with supected infections are taken to crematories (sometimes from curbside) directly. There were Chinese and foreign reports that there were people just droped dead in streets.
- I understand that you are an expert in contagious deseases. In your profession you look at the statistics. But the misery and suffering of affected individuals and their families are not reflected in the numbers of statistics. Yesterday there was a man who was infected. He couldn't get into a hostital. He couldn't go home because he didn't want to infect his family. Nobody wanted to take him. He left a message and jumped from a bridge... Another women was crying at community center with anger because her mom in her 70's waited 16 hours and still couldn't get treated. The community center official just told her to shut up...I saw these kind of videos posted online every day. For the time being it is still possible to post, but the government has given directives to shut down any group discussing the virus.
The western media mostly report about this disater quoting government figures. But it is much worse. We don't see that on public media here.
If you can do something please please please do so.
Thank you.
XXXX
