Coronavirus: ‘abandoned and in a living hell’? Staff crunch leads to 20 days without showers for elderly patients at Hong Kong’s AsiaWorld-Expo isolation facility
- Housewife says 93-year-old mother developed skin ulcers after 23-day stay at centre, calling older woman’s experience a ‘nightmare’
- Nurse says staff work 12-hour shifts and she attends to 80 patients daily
Conditions at the ward on Lantau Island are reportedly so dire, that not only have family members vented their frustration at how their loved ones are being treated, but senior medical staff who work there have also publicly taken the government to task over its management of the facility.
Lawrence Yip, a 46-year-old Hongkonger whose 83-year-old mother has been at AsiaWorld-Expo for more than two weeks, said in an interview on Friday that the government had been “so slow to wake up to the problem”.
“It has been two years since the pandemic began. How could the government not realise it and prepare for the worst?” he said.
He noted that his mother, who had difficulty walking, had not showered for more than two weeks and was lonely and afraid, suggesting authorities arrange daily video calls between patients and their family members.
A 65-year-old housewife, who only gave her surname as Wong, said she felt heartbroken and frustrated when she found her mother, 93, had developed skin ulcers after a 23-day stay at the facility.
