Hong Kong’s overwhelmed hospitals are keeping the dead in wards with Covid patients.

It’s an image that shocked many: our bodies of the useless piled up subsequent to Covid sufferers.

On Friday, the authorities in Hong Kong mentioned that town’s hospital mortuaries had stuffed up so rapidly amid a pointy Covid outbreak that physique baggage had been being crammed into wards with sufferers who had been nonetheless being handled for the virus.

“For among the our bodies, we’ve not been in a position to transfer them from the wards to the mortuary,” mentioned Sara Ho, the chief supervisor of affected person security and danger administration at Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority. “It might trigger some issues amongst sufferers.”

Officers are scrambling to beat again town’s worst Covid outbreak, with the federal government reporting greater than 600,000 instances and three,231 deaths since late January. And whereas such figures could not appear all that exceptional for giant international locations like the USA, Hong Kong is likely one of the final locations on Earth that’s nonetheless making an attempt to utterly stamp out the coronavirus.

The town’s fatality price from the virus is among the many world’s highest, largely as a result of so a lot of its older residents are unvaccinated. (Because the pandemic began, although, Covid has killed Individuals at far larger charges than individuals in different rich nations, in addition to in Hong Kong.) It’s a dramatic flip of occasions for a metropolis that had reported single-digit each day instances for a lot of the previous two years.

For a number of weeks, useless our bodies have been piling up at hospitals as a result of town’s public mortuaries, which may take as much as 3,000 our bodies, are full. The surge in instances has swamped ambulance providers, prisons, banks and even the publish workplace, leaving them severely understaffed. The federal government’s pandemic coverage that requires shut contacts of Covid instances to quarantine has made the state of affairs worse.

Well being officers addressed the problem of useless our bodies in hospitals after a number of photographs circulated on Fb and WhatsApp depicting silver physique baggage on gurneys lined up in public hospital wards. In some instances, the useless had been tucked beside beds with recovering sufferers.

Talking to reporters on Friday afternoon, Ms. Ho mentioned officers had examined the pictures and had “handled these instances.” She mentioned that because the photographs had been taken, officers had added momentary amenities to assist retailer our bodies. She additionally requested for endurance and understanding, saying that hospitals had been below “immense stress” and in “unprecedented” circumstances.

“We try our best to offer extra manpower to take care of this case,” she mentioned, “and we ask for understanding from sufferers.”