Zhang Hongmin, 45, a doctor of critical care medicine at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, celebrated the Chinese New Year on Jan 24 with his mother, his wife－who had just moved to Beijing after two years of having to live apart due to work commitments－and his young daughter.

A day later, he was assigned to the hospital's medical assistance team being dispatched to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, to help in the fight against the COVID-19 outbreak.

At the time, the city was the national epicenter of the then-epidemic, and he arrived there less than a day after receiving the notice of his deployment. The team took over the ICU zone of Tongji Hospital's Zhongfa Xincheng branch and set themselves up to begin treating the most critically ill patients being transferred there from other hospitals and zones.

Operating in the city from Jan 26 until April 15, the 186-member PUMCH team was one of the first to arrive in Wuhan but the last national medical assistance team to leave.

He remembers that it was an arduous tour of duty, involving many significant moments for him and the team.

One of the most critical rescues to stand out in Zhang's memory was that of a patient who presented difficulties during intubation.

"That patient had serious pneumonia and respiratory failure with low blood sugar and high heart rate, and we needed to keep performing bag valve mask ventilation on the patient until he was successfully intubated," Zhang recalls.

He and two other doctors took turns operating the handheld ventilation device for an hour－using one hand to hold the mask and the other hand to squeeze the bag through five layers of gloves. They all faced the danger of getting infected by aerosol discharge.