(Reuters) Spooked by a sneeze or a cough, Chinese
consumers are turning to online consultations in droves for advice about
possible coronavirus symptoms - a boon for a fledgling industry that
has struggled to win over customers.
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.
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.
Source: Reuters; Reporting by Yingzhi Yang in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; Editing by Edwina Gibbs
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