China Grapples With How to Handle All the Mild Covid Cases

Across China, many medical workers are becoming overwhelmed—not by a wave of critically ill Covid-19 patients, but by a wave of not very sick ones.

Apart from a few weeks in early 2020 in the city of Wuhan, hospitals in China haven’t experienced the overflowing Covid wards other countries have had to get used to. Instead, in the country’s zeal to stamp out new infections as quickly as possible, the longstanding drill has been to hospitalize every Covid case and quarantine all “close contacts”—including doctors and nurses.

As Covid infections rise rapidly in mainland China, that formula is starting to wreak havoc.

In early March, several social-media posts indicated something was happening at Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital, a major teaching hospital with more than 5 million patient visits in an average year.

Several people posted that their surgeries had been postponed due to a lockdown at the hospital. There were posts about medical workers sleeping in the hallways. Then a video started spreading of a physical fight at the hospital, allegedly after some nurses were concerned about caring for Covid patients without full-body suits.