Li Lun is desperate. On Tuesday her husband was confirmed as having the Wuhan coronavirus, after weeks of suffering with a fever. They have not been able to get him admitted to a hospital or find space for him to quarantine himself.

The family of six – Li, 39, her husband, her in-laws and the couple’s two children, both disabled – live in close quarters in a three-bedroom apartment in Wuhan. They sent the children to an aunt on Monday. Li and her mother-in law have developed symptoms and both have confirmed lung infections, which some doctors say should be reason enough to be quarantined. Li has been vomiting and had diarrhoea.

They have had no instructions from Wuhan’s centre for disease control, nor from the neighbourhood committee, which is in charge of communicating with health authorities and hospitals to arrange for treatment and follow-ups. Li posted on the microblog Weibo pleading for help, one of hundreds of posts in the last few days. “I’m afraid I will collapse. I have called almost every number, everywhere,” Li said. “Wherever we go, no one cares about us.”

More than 24,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus, which has killed almost 500 people. The bulk of infections and deaths have been in China’s central Hubei province, population 50 million, which has been in a state of lockdown for the last two weeks.

Infected residents and their relatives interviewed by the Guardian described a sense of helplessness and mounting outrage as they tried to get help for sick family members and shield healthy ones, often children.

One woman said she had taken her elderly parents to three hospitals searching for space for them. By the time they reached the last one, which had no free beds, her parents were so feverish they were unable to make the journey home. She put blankets on the floor outside the observation ward and they slept there. Her mother died this past week, having never made it to a hospital.

The majority of deaths have been among people over the age of 60, but the virus has also affected the middle-aged and young, with symptoms ranging from coughing, fevers and body aches to fainting, coughing up blood, extreme difficulty breathing, chest pain and weakness.

For some, the hardest part has been the isolation. It has been nine days since Yan, 37, last saw her husband and two children, an 11-month-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. After Yan developed a fever in late January, she separated herself from them and moved into her mother’s apartment. A few days later, Yan and her mother tested positive for the virus.

Yan and her mother spend their days in separate rooms. Yan reads the news and sits on the balcony. When they go into the common area to get food, they wear face masks. Their symptoms have been mild. Yan said she hoped that soon another test would show that her immune system had overcome the virus. “Then I can reunite with my husband and my baby,” she said.

Several patients described being sent home from hospitals unable to find space for them, and being ordered to quarantine themselves and “observe” their situation. Pan, in his mid-50s and diagnosed this week, chose to go to an outside isolation ward arranged by his neighbourhood committee. His wife had just tested negative for the virus and he did not want to infect her or the children. His wife’s mother died from the virus on Saturday.

There were about 20 people in the ward, he said, each in their own room. Every day three meals were delivered. There were no doctors or health workers to tend to them. Any medicine they wanted to take, they had to purchase and bring themselves. “Before, for a few days, nurses would come, but now no one comes. They said they can’t provide medical help,” Pan said.

Experts have said too many infected patients are being sent home, causing a growing number of family clusters of the virus. Few regular citizens know how to effectively self-quarantine, according to Zhang Xiaochun, the chief physician in the imaging department of Wuhan University Zhongnan hospital.

“Preventing the epidemic is a matter of human life. We can’t rely on people staying at home and looking after themselves,” Zhang said, according to the magazine Beijing News.

The government has depicted the epidemic as a battle to be fought by the people, especially those in Wuhan, and has worked to reassure the public with sweeping measures such as a traffic lockdown and the construction of two new hospitals in little more than 10 days.

Residents in Wuhan, already distrustful of authorities who waited weeks before sounding the alarm about the virus, have grown only angrier. As Li’s husband’s condition gets worse and she worries about her own health, she has become increasingly frustrated about being bounced between different government institutions. The hospitals tell her she must go through her local neighbourhood committee to arrange treatment. The neighbourhood committee, if anyone answers the phone, says all it can do is report to the higher-ups.

The more senior health authorities of the Wuhan CDC do not answer the phone. When they do, they say to go back to the local community committee. Over and over, Li is told to wait.

“It’s getting worse. He can barely hold himself up,” Li said of her husband. “This is a person’s life, how can we wait any longer?”

Liu, 38, was surprised that he caught the virus. He has been exercising for more than a decade and before Chinese New Year his wife had reminded him it was flu season. He wore masks when he went out, sometimes even two. But in late January, he developed a cough and at one point coughed up blood for four days.

He spends his days in the isolation ward getting human immunoglobulin and other injections. Connected to an ECG, he can’t move much around the room. He has stopped coughing blood and hopes to be discharged soon but he worries about his 68-year-old father, who is in the same ward but recovering more slowly. He is on a ventilator and they have only been able to communicate through texts.

Even when he goes home it’s not clear if his family will all be together. Liu’s seven-year old son is living with his grandmother and his wife is staying somewhere else.

“We all live separately to avoid cross-infection, but we really miss each other very much,” he said.

Additional reporting by Lillian Yang and Pei-Lin Wu

• This article was amended on 5 February 2020 to remove a misattributed quote.