Three years after the whole world: China’s hospitals are exploding because of the corona virus

by time news

Only three weeks have passed since China suddenly lifted most of its corona restrictions, in a sharp policy change that resulted from the unusual protest against the incessant closures of the past three years, and now the giant country is dealing with an extremely widespread outbreak of the virus. Although the authorities have stopped publishing infection data, and the mortality data they publish is not at all reliable, from hospitals throughout China there are now documents and testimonies of a tremendous load in the wards – with patients who sometimes wait for days to receive medical treatment and doctors who are required to work even though they themselves are sick – and cemeteries An abnormal load is reported.

China, let’s remember, has been leading since the virus first broke out in its territory in December 2019 “Zero Infection” Policy, within the framework of which it imposed closures and severe movement restrictions for any corona outbreak, no matter how small. Although these closures succeeded in preventing China from experiencing a widespread spread of the virus in its territory, as most of the world’s countries experienced at one point or another, but at the same time they severely disrupted the lives of the country’s 1.4 billion citizens and damaged its economy. Last month it broke out A highly unusual protest against the communist regimeand it seems that it acceded to the demands of the protesters: he canceled the policy of closures, stopped performing mass tests and, despite the widespread spread now, announced only yesterday Cancellation of the quarantine requirement for foreigners starting next month.

Health experts believe that China did not necessarily have to deal with a widespread outbreak following the lifting of the restrictions, and point out that the government in Beijing would have known to make better use of the time it “bought” through those restrictions and prepare for their removal. For example, he could have stockpiled more drugs to treat the disease – the country’s hospitals report, among other things, a severe shortage of Pfizer’s “Paxelobid” – and take care of extensive vaccination campaigns for the elderly population.

China claims that 90% of its population is vaccinated against Corona, but only two-thirds of the 191 million people aged 80 and over in its territory have been vaccinated, and many of them have not received a “booster” shot. At the same time, China insists on vaccinating its population with locally produced vaccines, which are less effective than the Western vaccines that are based on the mRNA method. Also the fact that so far there have been no widespread outbreaks in China, apart from the initial spread three years ago, means that the level of immunity in the population is low, and the virus can spread tremendously quickly.

As mentioned, China has stopped providing data on the number of infected people, because it claims that it is no longer “impossible” to track these data reliably with the cancellation of mass testing. It does continue to report deaths from the virus, but it is clear to everyone that these figures are inaccurate, to say the least: this morning China reported only one person who died in its territory in the previous day, after six days in which it did not report a single death. In total, it reports 5,242 deaths from corona since the beginning of the epidemic. The reason for this, it seems, is that China has tightened the criteria by which it determines that a patient has died from the virus – and now only attributes deaths directly caused by pneumonia or respiratory failure to the corona virus. These are much stricter criteria compared to other countries of the world.

Although the central government has stopped reporting infection data, local officials in various cities have admitted that the number of infected people is in the hundreds of thousands and even more. At the end of the week, estimates from internal discussions of China’s National Health Commission (NHC) were also leaked, according to which about 250 million people were infected with Corona in the first 20 days of December. At the same time, the British health data company Airfinity estimated that every day at least one million people are infected in China, and that more than 5,000 die from complications related to the virus. Health experts around the world estimate that the number of victims in the outbreak in China could reach one million people within a few months, and that in 2023 as a whole this number could reach up to two million. The fear is that the outbreak will only get worse next month, when masses of Chinese are expected to hit the road to reunite with their families for the Lunar New Year.

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A hospital in China Corona

A hospital in Haibei

(Photo: AP)

Now, as mentioned, evidence is coming from hospitals in China about a tremendous load, and from a hospital in the city of Tianjin in the northeast of the country, for example, videos have been distributed in which patients are seen waiting on wheelchairs or stretchers in almost every corner of the institution. In the video obtained by the “New York Times” newspaper, patients were seen, among other things, huddled in corridors from which coughing sounds emanate repeatedly. In another video taken by a team of the Associated Press, a worker at a hospital in Hebei province in the north of the country is seen imploring a group of people who arrived there to transfer a patient to another hospital, explaining that the oxygen supply has run out. “If you can’t even give him oxygen, how can you save him?” said the same worker. “If you don’t want any delays, turn around and move him quickly!”.

Sonya Jotar-Boro, a senior doctor at one of the private hospitals in Beijing, told the Reuters news agency that the number of patients there jumped five or six times, and that within one week the average age of those patients also jumped from 40 to more than 70. According to her, most of them are not vaccinated. “They want a medicine as if it is a substitute for a vaccine, but the medicine is not a substitute for a vaccine,” she added – noting that her teams have very strict criteria for cases in which medicines such as paclovide can be given. She expresses concern that the peak of the outbreak in the capital Beijing has not yet been reached.

Howard Bransen, who, like Gutar-Borrow, is a foreign citizen who has been working for many years in China, also said that the private hospital where he works in Beijing is dealing with a tremendous load. According to him, the intensive care department is “full”, as are other departments in the institution. “Many of the patients are hospitalized, and their condition does not improve within a day or two, so there is no flow. People keep coming to the emergency room and cannot go upstairs to the rooms in the hospital. They are stuck in the emergency room for days,” he said. Bernstein noted that in the past month he went from a situation where he has no corona patients at all to a situation where he treats dozens of such patients every day. “The biggest challenge, to be honest, is that we just weren’t ready for it.”

The outbreak did not spare the medical teams, and the fact that many of them are also infected with the disease adds a lot to the tremendous burden. A nurse in the city of Xi’an in central China testified that within a few weeks 45 of the 51 nurses in her ward were infected. “There are so many positive cases among my colleagues,” 22-year-old Erma, who identified herself only as Wang, “almost all the doctors got sick.” According to her, the medical staff at her hospital, and at other hospitals, were asked to come to work even if they were diagnosed as positive and developed mild symptoms. A doctor from the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the first outbreak of the plague, told the New York Times that due to the great shortage of manpower, a neurosurgeon in her department had to perform two surgeries in one day – even though he himself was struggling with corona symptoms. “The hospital was on the verge of collapse,” said the same doctor, Judy Poe. She noted that her ward usually has 10 to 15 nurses, but that number is now down to just two nurses. “Around 80-90% of the people around me were infected.”

This month, one of the hospitals in Beijing also warned its staff of a “tragic struggle” ahead. In a message he published on the Chinese social network WeChat, which was later deleted, it was said: “This is a tragic struggle. All of Beijing will fall, and all the hospital staff will be infected! All our families will be infected! All our patients will be infected! We have no choice, we cannot escape.”

In order to alleviate the huge burden in hospitals, China is now working to significantly expand the number of local clinics for treating patients with flu symptoms. Such clinics can treat patients with relatively mild symptoms, given the fact that in China it is customary to go to hospitals even for a minor illness. In recent days, more and more such clinics are popping up: in the city of Shenzhen, for example, it was reported that the authorities converted corona testing rooms into clinics, and in Beijing they were set up in stadiums and complexes that until now were used as isolation complexes. In the capital city alone, the number of clinics jumped to more than 1,000 within a few weeks.

China is also working vigorously to vaccinate its older population, and reported that on December 23, in one day alone, it distributed around 3.5 billion shots. But this is still a much lower number than the tens of billions of vaccines distributed daily in the first injection operation at the beginning of 2021. A key reason for this is that many Chinese – including adults – are afraid of getting vaccinated, and are especially afraid of the domestically produced vaccines, for which China has not published the results of experiments on their effects on people 60 years old and older. This fact may have contributed to the widespread rumors about the side effects of the Chinese vaccines. To expand the vaccination drive, the central government ordered local officials in cities to track down those adults and convince them to get a shot. In the Liulidon neighborhood in Beijing, they have stepped up and offered those 60 and older to get vaccinated for a fee of 500 yuan ($70).

In addition to the severe consequences of the outbreak in China, many of its residents are very happy to accept the lifting of the restrictions: the authorities’ announcement last night of the cancellation of the mandatory quarantine upon entering the country led to a burst of joy on the part of Chinese who will now, after three years of being cut off from the world, be able to go on trips abroad or be reunited with their children their families. “I feel like the epidemic is finally over,” said Pen Chengcheng, 27, of Beijing. Another resident there told the AFP news agency that for her the policy change was “like someone pressed a button that ends the movie” where Lived in recent years. “Finally, China is returning to normalcy.”

Last night’s announcement of the policy change resulted in a jump in the number of Internet searches regarding travel abroad. The Chinese travel platform Tongcheng reported an 850% jump in the number of searches, and a tenfold jump in the number of visa inquiries. Another travel platform, Trip.com , also reported a tenfold jump in the number of searches – in a period of only half an hour from the moment of the announcement last night. The most popular destinations for vacations were Macau, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand and South Korea. But in the shadow of the widespread outbreak, Chinese tourists may encounter an obstacle in the destination countries – With fears in the background that the widespread spread of the virus would lead to the development of a new and dangerous strain of it, Japan already announced last Friday that it would require travelers from China to present a negative corona test.

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