A secondary hospital in China’s central Hunan Province is overcrowded with patients amid the pandemic outbreak that started last December.
“We don’t have enough beds; we’re running short of medicines; our colleagues have almost all been infected by COVID,” claimed a nurse who works at the hospital, adding that only two nurses haven’t been infected by COVID so far.
China’s hospitals are divided into three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
A secondary hospital is similar to a regional or district hospital in the West, has 100 to 500 beds, and is usually set up in a medium-sized city or county. A primary hospital is similar to community hospitals in the West and gets the least allocation of medical resources. The top hospitals are the tertiary ones, similar to tertiary referral hospitals in the West, and get the most medical resources. The cost for medical treatment is usually much more expensive at tertiary hospitals….