This is why I say we are not hearing true numbers:
Tears, fear and panic grip China as coronavirus spreads
A woman in Wuhan surnamed Sun, 32, said in a phone interview that her husband, 34, has been sick since Jan. 15, first with a fever and cough, then with a lung infection that a doctor said was likely caused by the coronavirus.
“Of course we couldn’t guess it was something so bad. We didn’t know,” Sun said, adding that her husband works in Wuhan’s Hankou district, where the Huanan Seafood Market, the suspected source of the coronavirus outbreak, is located.
He’d even attended his company’s Lunar New Year banquet near that market, Sun said, when Chinese officials were still claiming that the virus was not transmissible between humans. Since then, his symptoms have escalated from high fever, coughing and fatigue to breathing problems. Sun’s parents, who live with them, have both caught fevers as well.
Her mother, 65, has developed a lung infection, and her father, 67, who had preexisting health problems including diabetes and high blood pressure, has a similar profile to elderly coronavirus victims who have died.
This whole time, Sun has not been able to get her family tested for the coronavirus, she said, because the doctors told her they had no test kits. Without confirmation of whether her husband has the virus, his death would go unreported as either a new virus case or death.
But her priority now is just to get him into a hospital, no matter how the government wants to classify him.
Ten days ago, Sun filled out an application for her husband’s hospitalization. The city has since designated specific hospitals for suspected coronavirus patients. That means she has to register her husband with a neighborhood committee first, which then reports the name to the hospital.
Every day is a disconcerting maze: The hospital tells Sun that her husband’s name is not on the list. She goes to the committee, which insists they reported his name. She asks the hospital, which says: no name. She goes back to the committee, and repeats the cycle.
Meanwhile, her husband can’t catch his breath.
“We’ve been telling the hospital, and they say, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” she said.
Sun said she’d just bought an oxygen device that aids breathing on Wednesday, and was reading its instruction manual. Two days ago, she sent her 3-year-old daughter to her sister’s apartment, choosing to separate from her child rather than risk her getting sick.
At home, Sun self-isolates in a separate room from her stricken husband, mother and father. She asks for help online several times a day.
Yesterday, her daughter started having a fever, too.
———
