re: Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ***W.H.O. DECLARES A GLOBAL PANDEMIC***

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One Wuhan resident, Peng Andong, 59, had been suffering from a persistent fever and lung infection for days when his local neighborhood committee told him to go to a makeshift quarantine site last week. Mr. Peng and his family were told that there would be doctors at the quarantine site, as well as test kits so he could get the official confirmation needed to receive proper treatment.

So on Feb. 5, Mr. Peng boarded a bus full of sick patients — none wearing protective gear — and was driven to a hotel converted into an isolation center. For several days, Mr. Peng messaged with his relatives regularly, updating them on the tumultuous conditions inside the hotel. “He said it was really chaotic in the first few days and there was no food or medical staff there,” said Peng Bangze, his son. Others have described similar conditions in interviews and in calls for help posted on social media.

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Deng Chao, 30, said that although doctors had told him he almost certainly had the coronavirus, he hadn’t yet received the official results from the test that is needed for hospital admission. Instead he was sent to a Wuhan hotel where he has been in a government-imposed quarantine for nearly a week.

Now, he said, he was getting progressively sicker and finding it more difficult to breathe. He said security guards had been stationed at the hotel entrance to prevent patients from escaping — and there were no doctors or medicine. “This is really like a prison,” Mr. Deng said. “Send me to a hospital, please, I need treatment,“ he said, in between bouts of coughing. “There is no one to take care of us here.”

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Peng Bangze, whose father was sent on a crowded bus to a converted hotel for isolation, recalled visiting last Saturday, after his father had been unreachable all day. He found his father in a comatose state alone in his room. Panicked, he called for help. When the ambulance came, both the driver and the hotel security guard refused to help him move his father, a construction worker, into the vehicle for fear of getting infected, the son said.

One hour later, the son was told that the hospital had no bed for his father and that he should go home and wait. Two days — and many phone calls — later, Mr. Peng’s relatives finally received a call from the local government notifying them that a hospital bed had been arranged. But when Mr. Peng’s son arrived at the hotel to help with the transfer, his father was lying face down on the bed, lifeless, in the same position he had left him.

The workers at the isolation venue had no explanation. They disinfected the room, the father’s body was removed for cremation, and the son collected his belongings. “I don’t know how this happened,” the son said. “It all happened in a few days. How could he suddenly be gone?”

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