Heartbreak in the Streets of Wuhan
A resident reconstructs how her mother and grandmother struggled through the onslaught of the virus—and lost.
Residents of Wuhan, China, on March 4.
Photographer: Costfoto/Getty Images
The two women were on the empty streets of Wuhan for three hours. Zhu E’Yan, 61, pushed her 86-year-old mother Ren Zhengzai down the road in a wheelchair, trying to find the nearest hospital willing to treat a patient with a fever. All bus and taxi services were shuttered. When they finally got to a hospital, the hallways were packed with people coughing, many with IV fluid drips on makeshift beds. Zhu sat on the floor for the entire night as they waited for a room. But none was available. The next day, she wheeled her mother—untreated—home on another three-hour trek.
In the next five weeks, they were turned away by one hospital after another—and both women are now dead. Li Yaqing, 38, wasn’t with her mother and grandmother when their ordeal began; she’s reconstructed it from phone calls and texts. In January her grandmother came down with a fever. Rumor had it that people were contracting a weird disease near the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. The family didn’t take it seriously at first, because they lived far from the market and Li’s granny rarely left the house except to play mahjong with her friends. Then, after a few days, the old lady began to have trouble breathing. At the same time, the rest of Wuhan went into lockdown.