Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - On March 24, a court in the city of Fuyang, in central China , declared that a $1.5 billion hospital that...
 |
| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - On March 24, a court in the city of Fuyang, in central China, declared that a $1.5 billion hospital that had only been constructed four years prior had filed for bankruptcy due to its inability to pay its debts.
On the direction of city officials, the Fuyang Minsheng Hospital had been actively involved in mass coronavirus vaccination and testing programmes in the city for the majority of the previous two years, training almost 100 staff members to perform throat swabs and setting up mobile vaccination facilities to travel to schools and workplaces.
The hospital's financial downfall was sealed when resources were diverted to what China refers to as its "zero-COVID" policy to contain and eradicate the virus. This compelled the hospital to halt many of the services on which it depended for revenue.
According to a civil decision from the Fuyang court considering Minsheng's application for bankruptcy restructuring, the hospital's "financial challenges" were a result of both its inability to obtain a bank loan and the "effect of the pandemic."
The 1,000-bed, 16-hectare Minsheng Hospital, according to Kanyijie, a specialised Chinese medical sector intelligence service, began to decline shortly after the initial wave of diseases spread throughout China.
According to Kanyijie in April, "Since January 2020, the hospital ceased several diagnostic and treatment activities to cooperate with the city's epidemic prevention and control work, and income plummeted substantially." "The financial strains were enormous, and there was essentially no medical revenue."
Local government officials publicly ordered medical staff at the hospital to put on protective gear and head to what they called the "front line" of the war on the coronavirus, where the doctors and nurses raced to complete 400,000 nucleic acid tests on locals in five days, even after the hospital declared bankruptcy and as administrators worked on a restructuring plan.
Hospital manager Li Wenfang stated on the hospital's website, "We will travel wherever we are needed." "We won't withdraw, and the epidemic won't either."
The cost of adhering to the nation's zero-COVID policy has driven dozens of private hospitals in China into bankruptcy over the past two years, including Minsheng. Numerous hospitals have closed, showing the unintended consequences of the rigid policy on the nation's attempts to modernise the fragmented health system that provides care for its 1.4 billion citizens. Minsheng and some other hospitals have continued to operate in some capacity through bankruptcy, but many have done so.
The second-largest economy in the world continues to lag behind the developed world in many healthcare metrics. It is currently implementing the "Healthy China" programme, which aims to increase cancer and other chronic illness survival rates while raising the average life expectancy to 79 from 76 by 2030. These objectives might be made more difficult to achieve by zero-COVID.
According to Hong Xiao, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who has been examining the pandemic's long-term effects on China's hospitals, "Health facilities at all levels and in all regions have been affected." The maintenance of mass testing and/or the response to the spike in COVID-19 patients required the diversion of human and financial resources from routine outpatient and inpatient care for non-COVID-19 disorders.
An inquiry for comment for this article was not answered by China's health administration. The authorities of the nation have staunchly supported the zero-COVID strategy as the least expensive alternative available to the nation, one that is required to protect an ageing population with low viral immunity and minimise hospital overcrowding.
Speaking last week while on a visit to Wuhan, Chinese President Xi Jinping acknowledged the financial expenses associated with zero-COVID but added that "it is preferable to momentarily impede economic development than to hurt the lives and health of the people." If China embraced the coronavirus as endemic, as all other major nations did, he claimed the results would be "unimaginable."
BANKRUPTCIES OVER TWICE AS HIGH
According to the most recent official data, private hospitals will account for around 15% of all patient visits in 2020 in China, with publicly owned hospitals taking care of the remaining 85%. At the end of 2020, there were 35,394 hospitals around the nation, both public and private.
According to the corporate data base Tianyancha, 46 significant private hospitals declared bankruptcy in 2021, up from 26 in 2020 and 21 in 2019. The first five months of this year alone saw the legal bankruptcy of 26 private hospitals, including Minsheng.
According to research based on Tianyancha data spread by state media late last year, as many as 685 hospitals, both public and private, are expected to close in 2020 alone, more than double the number from the previous year.
The coronavirus undoubtedly disturbed and weakened hospitals and healthcare systems around the globe, and some of those that shut down in China were harmed by additional reasons including the government capping medicine pricing, which was a significant source of income for many hospitals.
However, data reveals that foot traffic in private hospitals has dramatically decreased, partially as a result of laws requiring them to refer patients with COVID-like symptoms to public institutions. Many people have been unable or reluctant to go to hospitals for treatment for other ailments because of the widespread lockdowns and the fear of being forcibly quarantined or hospitalised, which has cost the hospitals money.
According to the most recent official figures, there were 7.74 billion visits to all healthcare facilities—public and private—in 2020, a decrease of almost 1 billion from the year before and the first annual decline since 2003.
The early 2020 coronavirus outbreak in China had a "devastating collateral effect" on patient numbers across all regions and services, with numbers still not fully recovered by June 2020 despite the outbreak being largely under control by March, according to a study published in the medical journal Lancet Regional Health in 2021.
From January to June of that year, it was estimated that visits to healthcare facilities decreased by about 24 percent, with the biggest drops occurring in developed regions of the nation. This decline was largely attributable to the virus, which either prevented patients from reaching hospitals or prevented hospitals from treating them because it interfered with operations.
According to the Lancet report, "These cuts and stalls in prevention and treatment will probably have severe collateral consequences on population health that much surpass the direct health effects from the illness." A significant percentage of healthcare facilities and providers face an existential threat due to "crippling financial losses."
DEATHS IN SHANGHAI
Critics assert that deaths have resulted from the misuse of medical resources to implement zero-COVID regulations. Zhou Shengni, a woman, passed away from an asthma attack on March 23 during the recent two-month Shanghai lockdown after being denied medical attention at the Shanghai East Hospital, which had shut down its emergency department due to "epidemic prevention and control measures," according to an official notice from the hospital.
Unfavorable news stories about what happened during Shanghai's shutdown have been censored by China. However, citizens created a list of 210 relatives who they said passed away because they were denied access to treatment or had their treatment delayed using the data collaboration platform Airtable. Some people used online medical records as evidence. The cases could not be independently verified by Reuters.
At a conference on March 25, Wu Jinglei of the Shanghai Health Commission stated that patients had difficulty receiving care for illnesses other than COVID.
During a briefing in late April, Zhao Dandan, deputy head of the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, stated: "There has been a massive pile-up of demand for emergency services over a short period of time." According to him, hospitals in the city are still unable to meet the needs of their patients because "there is still a large difference with the actual needs of the population."
In the first five months of this year, the Chinese government spent at least 150 billion yuan ($22 billion) on coronavirus testing. Huachuang Securities, a Beijing-based brokerage, estimates that the yearly cost of constructing a permanent testing system may be as high as 410 billion yuan.
All medical expenses associated with COVID shall be reimbursed by public insurance funds or central government subsidies, according to a rule issued by China's Ministry of Finance in 2020. The issue for many private hospitals is that they are not always quickly reimbursed by the government for such services, leaving them financially susceptible. Private hospitals offer part of the staff and equipment for such testing.
A doctor at one public hospital in Shanghai told Reuters that 300 staff members had participated in COVID testing since the city's lockdown began in early April. They continued to do so even after the restrictions were lifted in early June, and hospital managers still expected them to volunteer to test residents on the weekends.
China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that fighting the more contagious but less deadly Omicron variant had "put a great load" on China's medical resources, flooding hospitals not with critically ill patients but with asymptomatic and slightly symptomatic cases.
According to a study written by a group of local medical experts, including Zhang Wenhong, who has previously voiced doubt about zero-COVID policies, "Regions that previously admitted all SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals may not have sufficient hospital resources to admit non-severe Omicron patients." Later, the report was taken down from the CDC website.
Yanzhong Huang, a public health specialist with the Council on Foreign Relations, a U.S. think tank, stated that "all these resources have gone into implementing the zero-COVID plan, and less attention and less money have gone into increasing public health capacity."
