Jakarta –
Stephen McDonell
BBC News, Beijing
Hospitals in China are under enormous pressure, following the country’s rapid 180-degree turn in Covid policies that also allow doctors and nurses to infect patients.
Frontline health workers are still being told to come in even if they themselves have the virus due to a lack of medical staff.
A Chinese professor and health policy analyst is monitoring the crisis in his home country from Yale University in the United States.
Chen Xi told the BBC that he has spoken to several hospital directors and other medical staff in China about the enormous pressure on the current health system.
“Infected agents are still required to work in hospitals so as to create a transmission environment there,” he said.
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Health centers in China are rushing to increase the capacity of their treatment rooms to accommodate the large influx of patients.
But that number is filling up quickly, despite messages circulating that it’s okay to stay home if you catch the virus.
Professor Chen said more needs to be done to explain this to people.
“There’s no stay-at-home culture for mild symptoms,” she says. “When people get sick, they all go to the hospital, which can easily undermine the health system.”
The rush of citizens to buy medicines at pharmacies has also led to significant shortages across the country, especially of medicines used to treat colds or flu.
Home testing kits for Covid-19 are also hard to find.
In Beijing, even if restaurants have been able to reopen, their customers are few and the streets are quiet.
Many companies also tell employees they have to go back to the office, but many don’t want to.
All this seemed plausible when a few weeks ago, the government said that there would be no way out of Covid-zero, that those infected had to go to centralized quarantine facilities and that a lockdown was needed.
The Corona virus is something to be afraid of. The Chinese are lucky to live here because the Communist Party will not sacrifice them on the altar of openness.
Now the goal of bringing the epidemic back to zero cases has been abandoned.
Covid-19 is spreading like wildfire and the government insists that contracting the disease is nothing to worry about.
The easing of Covid restrictions in China is expected to last longer.
Then came the street protests, city after city, with demonstrators demanding a return to their old lives.
They want to be free to move again. There have been clashes with the police and chants of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s resignation and the Communist Party’s handover of power.
This is the resistance that breaks the back of Covid-zero.
BBC
According to Professor Chen, the decision to proceed with reopening China “wasn’t ideal” due to the increase in cases, but they had to.
He said countries like Singapore and New Zealand are making adjustments as infections ease.
However, China has moved on as massive outbreaks are ongoing in cities like Beijing.
The government “heeds the voice of the protesters” but added that this decision was not an ideal choice for them in terms of timing.
So protesters may have won, but the easing amid high contagion has left older adults fearful of leaving their homes.
One woman we met on a walk with her granddaughter said she would stay away from crowded places and still wear a mask and continue to wash her hands regularly.
However, reluctance to be in places where infection is present is more likely to spread the virus to all groups in society.
The impact on Beijing has been enormous.
Another reason restaurants are quiet is that the city government still requires a negative PCR test result within 48 hours for dining. However, most of the results don’t make it to the health code phone app.
Food and grocery delivery services are still in high demand as Beijing residents remain cautious when traveling outside. (BBC)
This is apparently due to the fact that the laboratory has been overwhelmed with a lot of work due to the rapid spread of Covid-19.
A 34-year-old woman, who is self-isolating at home after contracting Covid, told the BBC her experience so far has been very uneventful.
She said her symptoms weren’t as bad as she had feared and that she had everything she needed.
She also said she was much happier to be able to recover at home with her husband than in a crowded quarantine center.
However, he was also concerned. He has a sister with a small child, parents who live alone in their hometown and a grandmother who all have to go through this period.
Doctors are using social media to reassure the public that it’s okay to stay home while they catch Covid.
Officials have also begun converting Covid isolation centers in China into temporary hospital facilities to deal with the explosion of infections.
In just one day this week, some 22,000 people in Beijing tried to enter clinics with fever.
The next question arises, why didn’t the government prepare earlier by expanding the capacity of the hospital’s intensive care unit?
Why, then, has it taken so long to make the switch when countries around the world have already done so?
Why has Xi Jinping’s government allowed a Zero Covid approach to cause so much damage to the economy more broadly and people’s livelihoods more specifically?
A new vaccination campaign has already begun, but it should have been before China reached this stage.
The government said it was a modified virus, that the new strain was less dangerous and that meant the time was right to change the response.
However, there is more optimism now.
A group of overseas Chinese has set up a special chat on the WeChat app so that people living in other countries can share their experiences with Covid-19 with users in China.
The goal is simple. Calm their minds.
To be sure, the next few months will be difficult in China. Millions of people will be infected and there will likely be many deaths.
However, the old approach was clearly untenable, and eventually a way around it could be seen.
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