Survey: 95% of doctors devoted themselves to fight against COVID-19

A report shows that 95 percent doctors in China took part in the country's fight against the COVID-19 outbreak, ThePaper said.

The report, released on Thursday by Dingxiangyuan, an online health information service provider, is based on a survey covering 10,065 doctors from 200 departments in hospitals from 300 cities nationwide. It found that the doctors from various departments participated in the battle against the virus, with those from infectious disease control, respiratory and critical care departments seeing the highest participation.

Among the three departments, doctors from infectious disease department who were directly involved in treating COVID-19 patients both in severely affected regions and in local areas had the highest participation rate of 71 percent, while the other 29 percent joined in the work indirectly.

For doctors from critical care department, about 35 percent and 64 percent of them put themselves in the battle against the virus in direct and indirect ways respectively. While those not highly involved in the fight helped in other ways such as working the shifts in treating outpatients with fever. The percentage of such doctors stood at 77.

The report also shows that the average working time of the doctors during the epidemic was 9.6 hours, with 13 percent of them working over 12 hours, compared to the 8.9 hours before the epidemic.

Since the virus outbreak in Wuhan in January, millions of medical workers were dispatched to the front line battle against COVID-19. According to the white paper issued by Chinese government on June 7, from Jan 24 to March 8, the country rallied 346 national medical teams, consisting of 42,600 medical workers and more than 900 public health professionals to the immediate aid of Hubei province and its capital city Wuhan.