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Mr Wang has waited all year to take his father, who suffers from chronic kidney disease, to see a doctor, which was impossible during lockdown in Wuhan – ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic.

Within a week of the city easing restrictions, Mr Wang called for an ambulance to take his father to hospital, but now he fears it is too late – his health has deteriorated significantly due to complications from at-home dialysis.

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“He is going to die because he had to wait so long,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“It’s due to the coronavirus epidemic – if we could have seen a doctor earlier, this wouldn’t be a problem.”

Patients such as Mr Wang’s father are flooding into hospitals in Wuhan, at the same time as China says coronavirus infections are subsiding. Medical staff are rushing to care for patients who have not been infected by Covid-19 but have become severely ill as a consequence of delayed treatment. “We are under more pressure than during the peak of Covid-19, as there has been a huge influx of patients in a critical condition,” said a coronavirus frontline nurse, now mostly handling elderly patients with cardiovascular illnesses.