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 Due to the epidemic, hundreds of millions of Chinese are stuck at
home due to quarantine restrictions imposed by authorities or
companies. Even if not under quarantine, many are too worried to
venture for long outside or to visit a hospital for other ailments
as they fear they might catch the highly contagious virus.
The surge of inquiries has also been driven by healthcare platforms
offering some services for free amid the epidemic.
JD Health, an arm of JD.com Inc, has seen its daily volume of
respiratory-related online consultations jump by nine times while
mental-health consultations have grown five to seven times,
according to Xiao Jianbo, the company's general manager of online
healthcare.
"Most of the requests I've had between the end of January and
mid-February were about the coronavirus," said Liu Yafeng, a doctor
who works fulltime for JD Health. "People are so worried even just
by a sneeze."
Such is the state of fretfulness that "Always thinking I've been
infected by the virus" has become a trending topic with more than
570 million views on Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging
platform.
Liu said he worked around 12 hours per day from end January to
mid-February, but in a positive sign that panic about the epidemic
is receding, he is now working eight hours a day.
Baidu Inc said its online doctor consultation platform Wenyisheng,
which translates to "Ask Doctor", has been handling around 850,000
free inquiries daily. Of those 400,000 were respiratory-related,
around 50 times the level seen a year earlier.
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Alibaba Health Information Technology Ltd said it exceeded 100,000 consultations
a day on Jan. 29 and that some of its respiratory doctors were providing more
than 200 consultations daily. It did not provide comparisons with pre-outbreak
levels.
Online healthcare has long been seen as a promising sector in China, where there
is a dearth of doctors and patients often have to travel hundreds of miles to
see a specialist.
But the industry had struggled to win over customers and big listed firms like
Alibaba Health and Ping An Good Doctor have yet to turn a profit. Compared to
other internet services, online healthcare is not used as frequently and does
not benefit as much from word of mouth, industry executives say.
"Health consultations are very private, so you don't see a lot of people sharing
their healthcare experience with friends or followers on social media," said JD
Health's Xiao.
The coronavirus has, however, reset expectations with shares in Alibaba Health
surging 58% for the year to date while Ping An Good Doctor's stock has climbed
33%.
While analysts say more venture capital funding could soon flow into the sector,
some industry veterans warn that the sector has a long way to go.
"The outbreak has in fact educated the market, but I don’t think China’s online
healthcare has really taken off because of this," said Simon He, founding
partner at Shanghai-based Eminence Ventures.
That's only going to happen with innovation in providing more services such as
blood tests, he added.
(Reporting by Yingzhi Yang in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; Editing by
Edwina Gibbs)
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