A teacher has revealed how she contracted the coronavirus after visiting her mother who was dying of cancer in China.
Muying Shi, 37, flew to her birthplace in Wuhan – the epicentre of the deadly new infection that has now killed more than 300 – in early January to help nurse her ill mother Liping Wang, 63.
Ms Shi, who has lived in London for five years, is now under quarantine in the locked-down city’s Hospital 8 after CT scans showed the infection in her lungs, and has no idea if she can return to her home in Britain, the Sunday Mirror reported.
She said: ‘I am really scared… I fear for my life but I can’t think about it because I would just break down. I feel like I’m hanging on by a thread.’
Ms Shi, a private language tutor in Colindale, north London, is in hospital along with her 67-year-old father Xianging, also being treated for the virus.
She revealed how she is sharing a room – which she is not permitted to leave – with two elderly people, one of whom uses an oxygen tank to breathe, while her mother is three miles away in a different hospital in the final stages of rectal cancer.
She said: ‘It’s grim, to say the least. Nobody knows anything about the virus so there’s no proper treatment. My dad is I are being given painkillers and antibiotics, but there is no cure.’
Some of her fellow patients are receiving no medicine at all, and Ms Shi can hear them through the walls shouting at medical staff, she said.
‘I’m sitting here knowing I’m going to lose my mum and I just can’t stand the thought of this virus taking my father,’ Ms Shi said.
