Covid Repeat? Chinese Hospitals 'Overwhelmed', WHO Seeks Report On Mysterious Pneumonia

covid repeat? chinese hospitals ‘overwhelmed’, who seeks report on mysterious pneumonia

Beijing: A mysterious outbreak of influenza-like illness in China has prompted the World Health Organization to seek more details from the country. The outbreak was mostly reported among kids and hospitals are “overwhelmed with sick children” with respiratory illness.

Taiwanese FTV News reported that hospitals in Beijing and Liaoning have been struggling with an influx of children sick with pneumonia.

ProMed issued an alert over the “undiagnosed pneumonia” in children. ProMed is a publicly available surveillance system conducting global reporting of infectious disease outbreaks. Notably, it had also alerted about SARs-CoV-2 in December 2019 long before the pandemic swept the world.

“The lobby of Dalian Children’s Hospital is full of sick children receiving intravenous drips. There are also queues of patients at the traditional Chinese medicine hospitals and the central hospitals. A staff member of Dalian Central Hospital said: ‘Patients have to wait in line for 2 hours, and we are all in the emergency department and there are no general outpatient clinics’,” the ProMed mail alert read.

WHO Seeks Report

The WHO said Chinese authorities from the National Health Commission held a press conference on November 12 and reported an increase in respiratory diseases in the country. They attributed this to the lifting of the Covid-19 restrictions

The health agency urged China’s population to “follow measures to reduce the risk of respiratory illness”. It also asked authorities for more information about a reported spike in cases among children in the north of the country.

“WHO has made an official request to China for detailed information on an increase in respiratory illnesses and reported clusters of pneumonia in children,” the UN health body said in a statement posted on social media and confirmed to AFP by a spokesperson.

The WHO “has also requested additional information on recent trends in the circulation of known pathogens, including influenza, SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that gives rise to Covid-19), RSV affecting infants and Mycoplasma pneumoniae, as well as on the degree of overcrowding in the health system,” the statement added.

Northern China has reported an increase in “influenza-like illness” since mid-October compared to the same period in the previous three years, WHO said.

In the meantime, it urged people to take preventative measures, such as vaccination, keeping their distance from the sick, staying at home when ill, regular hand-washing and wearing masks as appropriate.