◼ COVID-19 / US Bloomberg Businessweek March 16, 202051*WHAT A TYPICAL LEISURE TRAVELER SHOULD EXPECT TO PAY, BASED ON CONSUMER AIRFARE SEARCHES. DATA: HAYLEY BERG, ECONOMIST AT HOPPER
Wuhan, China
The two women were on the empty streets of
Wuhan for three hours that day in January. Zhu
E’Yan, 61, pushed her 86-year-old mother, Ren
Zhengzai, down the road in a wheelchair, trying to
find the nearest hospital willing to treat a patient
with a fever. All bus and taxi services were shut-
tered. When they finally got to a hospital, the hall-
ways were packed with people coughing, many
with IV fluid drips on makeshift beds. Zhu sat on
the floor the entire night as they waited for a room.
But none was available. The next day she wheeled
her mother—untreated—home on another three-
hour trek.
In the next five weeks, they were turned away
by one hospital after another—and both women are
now dead. Li Yaqing, 38, wasn’t with her mother
and grandmother when their ordeal began; she’sby a large outbreak like the one in Italy or even
one that spreads city-wide. She expects she’d be
reimbursed for accommodation and car rental
if she is forced to cancel the trip. “I’m pregnant
and have asthma, so I need to be cautious as even
the regular flu could be dangerous,” she says.
�Stefan Nicola and Corinne Gretlerreconstructed it from phone calls and texts. In
January her grandmother came down with a
fever. Rumor had it that people were contract-
ing a weird disease near the Huanan Seafood
Wholesale Market. The family didn’t take it seri-
ously at first, because they lived far from the mar-
ket and Li’s granny rarely left the house except to
play mahjong with her friends. Then, after a few
days, the old lady began to have trouble breath-
ing. At the same time, the rest of Wuhan went
into lockdown.
On phone calls, her mother and grandmother
told Li—who lived alone in her own apartment—
about the illness but said she shouldn’t visit,
because they didn’t want her to get infected.
She called everyone she knew who might have
influence to try to get help. Li made hundreds
of calls—to the police, hospital emergency lines,
government directories, and hotlines listed by
netizens. No one answered. She blasted posts
seeking help on Chinese social media including
WeChat, Weibo, and Bytedance. She pleaded for
help with the local authorities who enforced the
quarantine on her neighborhood. After three
days a community hospital called to say there
was a spot for Li’s grandmother, but it was too
late. She died that night. The community authori-
ties then dispatched people to disinfect the wom-
an’s apartment.
On the same day, Li’s mother, Zhu, came down
with a fever. At Wuhan Hankou hospital, her lungs
showed mild signs of infection. But she tested
negative on the nucleic acid test, which identi-
fies the virus in a patient’s body through its spe-
cific genetic sequence. A lack of test kits and the
unreliability of test results caused many patients
to be excluded during the early weeks of the out-
break. The staff told Zhu to go home and take
pills to bring down her fever. After six days of self-
quarantine, on Feb. 6, she began to have trouble
breathing and started vomiting. Three days later
the authorities moved her, not to a hospital but
to a hotel, where she continued to go untreated.
On Feb. 10, after more online pleading and
phone calls by Li, her mom was rushed to an
intensive care unit. She called Li to ask her to
tap more of her connections to get her into a
better hospital. “She was going through a men-
tal breakdown,” her daughter says. Zhu had seen
two of her wardmates die by then. “I told her,
‘You’re in the ICU because I pulled all the strings I
could,’ and she got upset and hung up the phone.”
Li would desperately try to find help—even
unproven cures—for her mother. But, she says of
the phone call, “that was our last exchange.”What
is it like
to live
through
this?
What I’m
telling
my union
members
Sal Rosselli, president,
National Union of
Healthcare Workers,
Emeryville, Calif.
During the onset of the
HIV/AIDS epidemic in
the early 1980s, I was
living in San Francisco
and helping lead a large
health-care workers’
union in California. We
didn’t have all of the
answers on how the
disease was passed
from one person to
another and how best
to contain it.
Once again I find
myself dealing with
a national health
emergency which we
don’t yet know how to
fully contain. I tell our
members the same
thing about Covid-19
today as I did about
AIDS back then—that
we are going to get
through this together
with brutal honesty and
transparency. Health-
care workers don’t
always know whether
they can trust their em-
ployers. As a union we
can help by monitoring
health-care providers,
determining which ones
are best at protecting
caregivers and holding
the others to that
standard. We don’t want
to scare people, but the
more honest and open
we are about the illness,
the faster we will learn
how to limit infections.
Caring for the sick is
a calling. Our members
are committed to
doing their jobs, but
they want to know that
their employers—and
government—won’t
take any shortcuts in
protecting their safety
or abandon them if they
become infected or
placed in quarantine.
The last thing we want
is for caregivers to be
afraid to seek treatment
themselves—and risk
spreading the illness to
patients—because they
can’t afford to be sick.
�As told to Cynthia
Koons