China’s hospitals are already under enormous pressure, following a rapid 180-degree change in the country’s Covid policy to allow doctors and nurses to infect patients.
It appears that frontline medical workers are being asked to come in despite having the virus themselves due to staff shortages.
A Chinese professor specializing in health policy is monitoring the crisis in his home country from Yale University in the US.
Chen Xie told JEE News he was currently speaking to hospital directors and other medical staff in China about the massive strain on the system.
He said that those who are infected need to work in hospitals which creates an environment of transmission there.
Hospitals in China have hurriedly increased their fever ward capacity to accommodate a large influx of patients, but these are filling up fast, in part because the message is still getting through that if you If you catch the virus, it is okay to stay at home.
Professor Chen says more needs to be done to explain this to people.
“There is no culture of staying at home for minor symptoms,” he said. “When people feel sick, they all go to the hospital, which can easily crash the health care system.”
A rush at pharmacies has led to significant shortages of cold or flu medicines across the country. Home testing kits for COVID-19 are also hard to come by.
In Beijing, although restaurants are allowed to reopen, they have few customers and the streets are quiet.
Companies are asking employees to return to the office, but many don’t want to.
It all makes sense when you consider that, just a few weeks ago, the government was saying that zero Covid would make no difference, that infected people should go into centralized quarantine facilities and that lockdowns It was necessary.
The corona virus was a fear and the Chinese people were lucky to be here because the Communist Party would not sacrifice them on the altar of openness.
Now that the goal of bringing each outbreak back to zero cases has been abandoned, Covid-19 is spreading like wildfire and the line from the government is that catching the disease is not a concern.
China’s easing of Covid restrictions was expected to come more slowly, much more slowly.
Street protests followed, in city after city, protesters demanding a return to their old lives. They wanted to be free to roam again. There were clashes with police and chants for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to step down and the Communist Party to step down.
This was the straw that broke the back of zero covid.
According to Professor Chen, this meant that the timing of China’s reopening was “not ideal” but they had to do it.
He said countries such as Singapore and New Zealand made their own changes when infections subsided. However, China has gone ahead with full-blown outbreaks in cities like Beijing.
He said the government had “heard the voices of the protesters”, but added that it was not an ideal choice for them in terms of timing.
So the protesters may have won, but the speed of the government’s cave-in has scared the elders out of their homes.
A woman we met while walking with her grandson said that she would stay away from crowded places, that she would wear a mask and wash her hands regularly.
Yet there is a reluctance to live in places where infection is more likely for all groups in society.
Beijing has had a great impact.
Another reason the restaurant is empty is that the city government still requires a negative PCR test result within 48 hours to eat inside. However, most of the results are not coming through Health Code phone apps.
