Devoted medics redouble efforts as pandemic flares again

Ti Gong

Since the resurgence of COVID-19, medics have redoubled their efforts in the fight against the pandemic in Shanghai. Here are two typical stories:

Zhu Xinglong is the leader for an emergency transportation team at the Minhang Medical Emergency Center, responsible for transferring patients to designated locations.

Since March 1, Zhu and his team have been stuck in the ambulance. With the increase of communities under lockdown, urgent tasks come one after another. They have no fixed time to eat and sleep, and in fact sleeping time is very limited.

At 3:15am one day, Zhu received a call that a pregnant woman under lockdown in Meilong needed to be taken to hospital. Zhu and his colleague set out immediately, drove the ambulance to the community, picked up the woman and sped away; At 4am, the woman arrived at the hospital.

This is just a small slice of their life. As long as Zhu is on duty, he is on standby 24x7. Every time the phone rings, he quickly puts on protective clothing, prepares relevant items and rushes to the scene as quickly as possible.

Zhang Xuesi is a doctor at the Minhang Community Medical Service Center and she has joined the preparation for COVID-19 sampling in many communities in the district.

For citizens, sampling just means taking a throat swab, but for people like Zhang, they have to prepare for at least eight hours to ensure the smooth running of the process.

"On receiving the notice, we first divide the community into three parts: the polluted area, semi-polluted area and clean area, find the sampling sites, find the place where the volunteers live, carry out basic disinfection, move pandemic prevention materials and living materials, and guide the volunteers to wear and take off protective clothing, etc," Zhang said.

"There is lot of preparatory work needed to be done."