Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
I’m scared... I feel like my life’s hanging by a thread
LONDON-BASED TEACHER STUCK IN WUHAN VIRUS ISOLATION WARD
A TEACHER told of her horror last night after travelling to China and contracting the deadly coronavirus.
Muying Shi, who has been living in London for five years, is in quarantine in locked-down Wuhan after CT scans showed the infection was in her lungs.
The 37-year-old, the first British-based person to talk about the virus while in hospital, said: “I am really scared.
“I fear for my life but I can’t think about it because I would just break down. I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread.”
Muying contracted the disease after flying to her birthplace in early January to help nurse her mum Liping Wang, 63, who was already dying of cancer.
She is now in the sprawling city’s Hospital 8, where her father Xianqing, 67, is also being treated for the virus.
Her voice shaking with emotion, she told the Sunday Mirror: “I am sharing a room with two elderly people and one is using an oxygen tank to help her breathe.
“I’m not allowed out of this room and, what’s worse, is that I’m not able to see my mum who is in a different hospital three miles away in the last stages of rectal cancer.”
PANICKING
Nearly 60 million people are under lockdown in Chinese cities as researchers race to develop a vaccine for the virus, which has so far killed 259 people and affected 11,000 worldwide. It has spread to more than 20 countries and UK officials confirmed two cases on Friday.
In pandemic epicentre Wuhan, China’s seventh-biggest city with a population of 11 million, hospitals are straining under the weight of thousands of panicking patients who fear they have the disease.
In many Chinese cities people have improvised protective headgear out of items such as large water bottles.
Muying said: “It’s grim. Nobody knows anything about the virus so there’s no proper treatment. My dad and I are being given painkillers and antibiotics, but there is no cure.
“Some patients get no medicine at all and I can hear them through the walls, yelling at the doctors.
“The doctors and nurses are wearing full protection suits but you can tell they are nervous too.
The staff who deliver our food are speculating it is contaminated.
“There are around 100 people with the suspected virus in the hospital and there’s no information coming from anywhere. I’m just trying to hold it together for my mum and dad.
“I’m sitting here knowing I’m going to lose my mum and I just can’t stand the thought of this virus taking my father.”
Muying, who works as a private language tutor in Colindale, North London, flew out to Wuhan on January 10 after being told her mum did not have long to live. She said: “Mum told me there was some sort of pneumonia-type disease going around but that the Government was saying it was not serious. In mum’s ward there were people coming in and out without masks all the time.
“It was only last week that doctors
started going privately to patients and asking their families to wear face masks that I started to really worry.
“Then one day men in hazmat suits marched into my mother’s cancer ward and said she needed to move to another floor within 30 minutes. They didn’t tell us why, it was just an order.
“We now know they were making space for coronavirus patients.”
Muying went out and bought a box of face masks but it failed to stop her and her dad getting sick. She fell ill with a fever and diarrhoea on Monday while he got ill the following day.
They attended a “fever clinic”, one of several centres set up to test residents for coronavirus.
CT scans on Muying’s lung showed a shadow and doctors confirmed she had the virus. Her father, who showed the same symptoms, was suspected to have it. Both were admitted to hospital later in the week. Chinese officials have been accused of trying to cover up the extent of the virus and Muying said she will only be added to the recorded statistics once she has tested positive through a test kit being handed out by the State.
But she said: “Nobody is handing out the kits. The doctors say they have run out but I don’t know if that’s true.
“The news here says there are around 17,000 people in hospital or at home suspected to have the virus. But doctors in the hospital are saying that figure is closer to 30,000.
She added: “I talk to dad in the other ward on my mobile, and he keeps crying because we can’t visit my mum. She’s just taking painkillers and waiting to die. We are heartbroken we can’t be with her.”
Muying has no idea if she will be allowed to return to Britain. She said:
“I’ve no idea what the future holds. Right now I have to stay alive and stay strong for my parents.”
On Friday, 83 Brits evacuated from China arrived back in the UK and are now quarantined at Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral, while there are two confirmed cases in York.