CHENGDU, Dec 28: China’s hospitals were under heavy pressure on Wednesday as a rising wave of COVID-19 infections in the country limited resources to move to treat the virus endemically.
In an abrupt change of policy, China earlier this month began to end the world’s strictest Covid regime of lockdowns and widespread testing, preparing its battered economy to fully reopen next year Went.
The move, which came after widespread protests against the restrictions, according to some international health experts, means that Covid is spreading largely unchecked and infecting millions of people a day.
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The speed with which Covid rules have been relaxed has overwhelmed China’s fragile health system and prompted countries around the world, which have long been living with the virus, to impose travel restrictions on Chinese visitors. To ponder, questions about official figures coming out of Beijing.
Staff at Huaxi, a large hospital in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu, said they were “extremely busy” caring for Covid patients, as they have been since restrictions were eased on 7 December.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years and it’s the busiest I’ve ever been,” said an ambulance driver outside the hospital, who asked not to be named.
There were long queues in and outside the hospital’s emergency department and the adjacent fever clinic on Tuesday evening. Most people who arrived in ambulances were given oxygen tanks to help them breathe.
A member of the pharmacy staff in the emergency department said, “Almost all patients have Covid.”
He said the hospital does not have any stock of Covid-specific medicine and can instead provide medicines for specific symptoms like cough.
Zhang Yuhua, an official at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, said the patients who have come in recently are mainly elderly and suffer from serious underlying diseases. He added that according to state media, the number of patients receiving emergency care has increased to 450-550 per day, from about 100 earlier.
Photos published by the state-run China Daily showed queues of mostly elderly patients, some breathing through oxygen tubes, receiving treatment from medical staff in white hazmat suits inside the hospital’s intensive care unit.
Official figures, however, show only one Covid death in the seven days to Monday. International health experts predict at least one million Covid deaths in China next year.
travel rules
In a major step towards free travel, China will stop requiring incoming travelers to go into quarantine from January 8, officials said this week, prompting many Chinese people, cut off from the world for so long, to To check travel platforms.
Read also: Chinese in high spirits, planning overseas travel as inbound Covid quarantine nears end
But as online searches for flights soared from record lows on Tuesday, residents and travel agencies suggested it would take months for anything to return to normal, amid concerns about Covid and more careful spending due to the impact of the pandemic.
In addition, some governments were considering additional travel requirements for Chinese visitors.
US officials cited a “lack of transparent data including viral genomic sequence data” as reasons for doing so.
India and Japan will require a negative Covid test for travelers from mainland China, with those testing positive in Japan undergoing a week in quarantine. Tokyo also plans to limit increased flights to China.
Asked about additional travel requirements imposed by Japan and India, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday, “COVID measures should be scientific, moderate and should not affect the normal flow of individuals.”
financial distress
China’s $17 trillion economy could face a slump in factory output and domestic consumption in the near future, as workers and shoppers fall ill.
Global luxury stocks rose on news of China reopening its borders, but reaction in other corners of the market was more muted, as the world’s second-largest economy is expected to face a slump in global demand in 2023.
US carmaker Tesla plans to run a reduced production program at its Shanghai plant in January, extending restricted production that began this month into next year, according to an internal schedule reviewed by Reuters. Tesla did not give any reason for the reduction in production in its production plan.
Once the initial shock of the transition passes, some economists expect Chinese growth to bounce back with a vengeance, expected to hit its lowest rate in nearly half a century this year, at around 3%.