Amid dearth of resources, COVID infections widely spreading among elderly in China's Shanghai hospital

The Covid infection in China's Shanghai Hospital, a facility where the COVID crisis is unfolding, the infection is majorly spreading among the older population and people are continuously losing their lives for the past three days with a dearth of tests and other resources.

China's largest city has exposed the elderly, a vulnerable group in the country. Two attendants at the Shanghai Donghai Elderly Care Hospital in interviews said that the coronavirus was spreading widely among the mostly older patients in the facility, and that people had died on each of the past three days, reported the New York Times.

The two spoke on the condition of anonymity as they feared losing their jobs. With the rise of the highly transmissible Omicron variant in China, the country is struggling to keep up with the rising covid cases.

Lockdowns were imposed in major cities like Xi'an and Shenzhen, as well as the entire northern province of Jilin.

A woman who picked up the phone at the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital confirmed an outbreak of Covid there but declined to say how many cases there were or to provide other details. Bloggers shared photos and descriptions of the outbreak in the Donghai facility on Chinese social media, but it went unreported by official Chinese media.

A shanghai resident, Chen said, "The management of their hospital is a mess, and there is no food. They only had their meal at 9:30 last night," Ms. Chen said. "My mother's feet and hands hurt, but no one has given her any medicine." The crisis in the Donghai hospital exposes a deeper challenge, reported the the NY Times.

( With inputs from ANI )