China sees rise in Covid cases as its strict policy eases

Beijing:

Covid cases are on the rise in China’s capital, officials said on Monday, as the country increasingly moves away from its zero-tolerance coronavirus strategy.

Just days after China began easing restrictions, Beijing officials said more than 22,000 patients had visited hospitals across the city in the past day – 16 times the number from a week earlier.

“The current trend of rapid spread of the epidemic in Beijing still exists,” Li Ang, a spokesman for the city’s health commission, told a briefing on Monday.

“The number of fever clinic visits and flu-like cases has increased significantly, and … the number of emergency calls has increased exponentially.”

China reported 8,626 domestic infections on Monday, but the number is believed to be much higher because testing is not mandatory for most of the population.

As the country navigates a difficult path from its zero-Covid policy to living with the virus, many people with symptoms have opted for self-medication at home.

Cold and fever medicines have sold out in virtually all pharmacies in Beijing, and rapid antigen tests are running low as people stock up in anticipation of a virus surge that threatens the lives of millions of unvaccinated veterans.

Social media users reported a surge of infections in smaller cities including Baoding in Hebei province and Dazhou in Sichuan, with hospitals flooded and residents unable to buy medicines.

AFP was not immediately able to verify the claims.

“This is really serious, the supply of medicine is not enough and it is being badly managed,” wrote one person on the Twitter-like platform Weibo.

In the absence of adequate medical infrastructure and primary care, China’s rural interior is particularly vulnerable to health crises such as Covid.

– ‘the end of an era’ –

In a major step toward ending years of harsh restrictions, China said on Monday it would shut down an app used to track travel in areas with infections.

The state-run “communications itinerary card” was a central part of zero-Covid, tracking the movement of millions of people through their phone signal data.

It was one of those tracking apps that have controlled everyday life through the pandemic. Most people still use local “health codes” run by their city or province to enter shops and offices.

Social media users hailed the retirement of the software, noting that the government is shutting down its main tracking app.

One user on Weibo wrote, “Goodbye, it announces the end of an era, and also welcomes a new one.”

Others asked what would happen to the mountains of data collected and expected to be deleted.

– ‘Rapidly spreading’ –

“The political victory of returning to normalcy is huge,” said Kendra Schaefer, tech partner at research consultancy Trivium China.

But that normalcy means the country is facing a surge in cases it is unprepared to handle, with millions of elderly people not fully immunized and hospitals unable to take large numbers of patients. Is.

China has one intensive care unit bed per 10,000 people, Xiao Yahui, director of the department of medical affairs at the National Health Commission, warned last week.

The official number of Covid cases has dropped sharply from a record high last month, but top Chinese health expert Zhong Nanshan warned in state media on Sunday that the Omicron variant was “spreading rapidly”.

The easing of restrictions has also released demand for domestic travel, with state broadcaster CCTV saying on Monday that flights from Beijing’s two main airports were expected to soon return to 70 percent of 2019 levels.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)