Personal Experience of Late Night Hospital Service in Shanghai during the Pandemic

Last night my 4-year old kid was having a fever. Usually, it’s not much a big problem if we had the medicine to mitigate her condition. But we were too late, realizing that the medicine for that had been used up and there was no other alternative to be found in the house.

She was shivering, her feet and hands were cold. and the temperature measured on her forehead was rising quickly. My wife and I were terrified so after a moment’s hesitation we decided to take her to the hospital near our residential community, just across the Huangpu River. The hesitation is because it’s 3 am and both of us were going to work the next day. So a good night's sleep is precious to us.

But the situation commanded us to do what’s right and necessary. I hailed a cab on my wife’s phone and a good thing about living in big cities of China is, many commercial services are fast and convenient, the cab arrived in a few minutes. I carried here in my hands while we walked downstairs and then to the cab.

I started to become anxious as the driver, turned out to be someone just coming to our area for the first time. Therefore, he’s not familiar with the routes to the hospital. Even though the hospital is physically very close to our residence but we usually need to take the bridge above the river to get to it. As I was just about to mention this to the driver, he finally found the right route to get on the bridge.

The driver seemed a mild, nice young man. He realized we were in an emergency so he took us to the hospital as quickly as he could, without violating the traffic rules. After saying thanks to him we got off the car and head to the hospital gate.

We were surprised and frustrated by the unreasonable fact that the hospital doesn’t receive children in need of emergency attention like ours. I immediately thought it might have something to do with the rising cases of Covid-19 for the winter. But still, I find it’s hard to accept that. Shanghai is a super-big city with about 25 million people living in it. It’s hard to imagine few or no people need medical care during the night. How are they supposed to cope with that? Well, the gatekeeper we met last time told us how: “Go to hospitals in the city center right away.” I thank him in my mind for the last two words — he seemed to care.

It didn’t take us long to find out we couldn’t get help from the hospital. So after we came out my wife called the driver who had taken us there. Fortunately, he was still nearby. And we get in the car and went straight to the city center Children’s Hospital.

Before we arrive I had a feeling that it’s not going to be a smooth process. I was right, aside from the usual temperature check for all people entering the facility and showing the passcode on our phones, and filling in an information sheet on my phone, all for the prevention and control of Covid infections. We were also asked to go through nucleic acid testing before we can go to the doctor’s room to get treatment for Dora — our daughter.

However, I understand that. China is famous for its strict Covid prevention and control policies and zero-case ambition. The problem was, there’s no medical staff performing the testing, but a plate at their window saying, “Sanitization underway, wait for 30 minutes please.”

We waited, on one of the benches nearby. After a while, we decided to get one of the antipyretics by ourselves. So I went out of the hospital to try one of the pharmacies that were still open at the time and leave my wife and Dora in the hospital. I found one along one street but I couldn’t buy it because the staff there told me she needs to get into the computer system to sell me one of those antipyretics, but she couldn’t. And I was told to come back to her the next day to buy one.

As I was about to search for another pharmacy, my wife called saying she could order one and have it delivered to us while we wait in the hospital. That saved all of us from the pain of waiting in the hospital. In merely a few minutes, we picked up the antipyretic dropped off by a courier. And we decided to give it to Dora.

We were so relieved when we found her temperature was dropping. So we hold off the medicine and went back home on another cab. The antipyretic cost us 14 Yuan (about 2 US dollars), it’s very little compared to the money we spent on hailing the cabs and the anxiety and pain we experienced during the whole process, and the time we deducted from our sleeping.

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