‘Lack of resources, doctors overworked’

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  Sjoerd den Daas

  corresponding China

Full shelves in well-stocked supermarkets and pharmacies. The production of antipyretics has been successfully increased. Anyone who turns on Chinese state television can only conclude that the country is coping well with the largest coronavirus outbreak to date. Meanwhile, the healthcare system is under strain.

He allegedly had a fever for three days, then died. Heart failure would have been fatal for Chen Jiahui (23), an intern in Chengdu. “Fulminant myocarditis,” an explosive inflammation of the heart muscle, could be read in Chen’s medical records. The file could be viewed by his fellow students.

“We don’t know more details because no autopsy was done,” says Li, who, like Chen, works at West China Hospital. Despite a positive corona test, she was still on the operating table during the day to perform a liver transplant, but collapsed in the evening. Li: “We know that viruses can cause myocarditis, including the coronavirus.”

Care has been under severe strain since the draconian zero-covid policy was suddenly released. After nearly three years of severe lockdowns and an unprecedented testing operation that initially helped China buy time and save lives, the floodgates burst open earlier this month. “A large number of doctors are infected with corona,” says Li. “There is a huge shortage of staff and resources. Many doctors are overworked.”

This is no different in Beijing, though few are keen to share what exactly goes on behind the hospital gates, for fear of repercussions. “Nobody wants to say anything about it,” says a health worker in Beijing, when asked how the practice compares to the image in Chinese state media. “No comment.”

Even in central Chongqing, hospitals and funeral homes can hardly cope with the number of corona cases:

Until a few weeks ago, the release of corona measures, such as in the USA, was still interpreted by the Chinese authorities as a humanitarian disaster. They have now rotated 180 degrees. Prominent epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan last week suggested calling the disease a “coronavirus cold.” Deaths are poorly reported.

On social media, propaganda workers and doctors are scuffles to proclaim Beijing’s new happy news: omikron is not serious. “More contagious, but less disgusting,” writes Dr. Yu Changping of a hospital in Wuhan. “I expect the rush for care to gradually decrease.”

It’s not that far yet. The fever clinic at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital is packed. Acetaminophen and other antipyretics are out of stock in many places.

A doctor from another hospital in Beijing sees hard knocks in his clinic. “Before the policy was released, hospitalizations and care were still pretty orderly,” he says. “The biggest obstacle then was the PCR test”, recently another requirement for participating in public life.

Now that testing has largely stopped, it is no longer possible to separate infected patients from uninfected ones, doctors say.

They are often infected themselves. “You don’t know if a patient is positive or negative,” says the doctor. “And if you are infected yourself, you carry the virus to other departments as well.” With the closure of PCR sites and the disorderly release of ‘zero covid’, Beijing has largely lost sight of the virus, as well as its long-lauded control.

Reliable data on the number of infections is no longer available or is not being released. China has reported 3696 corona cases today, but that says little. The total number of deaths is officially 5241. This also means nothing: corona is hardly considered the cause of death in any of the cases.

British research agency Airfinity currently puts the number of infections at around 1 million and says more than 5,000 people die from the virus every day in China. In the internal documents of the Chinese health department, seen by Bloombergthere is even talk of 248 million new infections in the first 20 days of this month.

Where corona was an exception, there are now fewer and fewer people in cities like Beijing and Shanghai who are not infected. Data from search engine Baidu shows that the crown is dominating life in more and more parts of the country. Especially in Shanghai and coastal provinces such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the number of searches for “fever”, “cough” and “sore throat” is soaring.

If the search terms are indeed a barometer of the number of infection cases, Beijing has already passed the peak of this first ‘exit wave’. But across most of China, the biggest surge in coronavirus cases since “Wuhan,” where the virus first emerged three years ago, doesn’t appear to be over. Those who do not have a fever must therefore continue to work. All hands are needed.