Medical staff in Hong Kong are threatening to walk off the job if the city doesn't close its border with China over the new coronavirus outbreak.
Nurses in Hong Kong are threatening to go on strike if the city doesn't shut its border with mainland China. Some nurses have already engaged in unauthorized sick-outs to protest what they say is a lack of action by Hong Kong officials to address the new coronavirus outbreak. As NPR's Jason Beaubien reports in Hong Kong, hospitals in the city are scrambling to set up isolation wards and are already overwhelmed.
BEAUBIEN: Sitting in a small garden smoking area in front of the emergency room, Dr. Wong says the hospital is anticipating that in the coming weeks, a wave of patients with Wuhan coronavirus will be coming through their doors. The staff is being divided up into what are being called dirty and clean teams. Starting next week, the dirty team will handle all suspect and confirmed coronavirus cases in three isolation wards.
WONG: In general, we are talking about around four to six weeks of time where they are completely isolated from the rest of the world. So you can imagine how stressful that would be and what kind of life that would be. BEAUBIEN: All of them are from Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak in China. And most of them arrived in Hong Kong on the high-speed train. On Thursday, Hong Kong finally did shut down all rail links to China, including its prestigious high-speed trains. Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, also halted all ferry service to China and barred people from Hubei from entering the city. But she stopped short of fully closing the border to the mainland.
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