ALTHOUGH it was a Sunday, a day for rest, Fu Yingyun, the director of the Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Department of Shenzhen People’s Hospital, still appeared in the ward wearing medical protective clothing and checked the beds one by one with her team until noon.

The department’s medical staff have been working day and night on the frontline since Dec. 22, 2022. At their most challenging time, all of the department’s staff had tested positive for COVID-19, but went back to work once their fevers had subsided.

“All 155 beds were full. All of them were elderly patients with chronic diseases, and most of them were over 80 years old,” Fu told Shenzhen Special Zone Daily recently.

As a national key clinical specialty, the Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine Department of Shenzhen People’s Hospital has helped undertake the treatment of critically ill COVID patients in the city.

Fu is a veteran in the fights against epidemics in Shenzhen. She participated in the fight against the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak in 2003 and helped save the life of the city’s first patient who had been infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2006.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Fu stayed at the Third People’s Hospital of Shenzhen, the city’s designated hospital for COVID treatment back then, for over 100 days as the leader of the critical illness treatment expert group.

In the eyes of her peers, Fu is an “Iron Lady” who can endure hardships and crack hard nuts.

A critically ill COVID patient who had suffered from heart, kidney and respiratory failures and lung infection recovered from COVID recently. The over-70-year-old patient was found to have more than 20 chronic diseases after hospitalization.

Based on the patient’s complicated health condition, Fu managed to find a way to treat the patient with COVID convalescent plasma, as the patient was unable to take many antiviral drugs due to kidney issues.

With the medical staff’s careful treatment, the patient was able to use a noninvasive ventilator on the fifth day of admission. On the 11th day, the patient was clinically cured from COVID and was transferred to the nephrology department for uremia treatment.

Fu and her team will stay in the ward again and spend a busy Spring Festival. “I will be there wherever I’m needed,” Fu was quoted as saying. (Zhang Yu)