Instead of promoting vaccination and strengthening the health system, Beijing has invested more in prevention measures that have choked the economy and provoked population revolt
With how contagious Covid is, the question isn’t if it will catch you, but when and how. The only cure is a preparation with extensive vaccination and a strengthening of the health system. With more or less success, all countries have done so to achieve normalcy, but yes, after paying a high price for the past two and a half years.
This is exactly what has not happened in China since the outbreak of the pandemic was stopped in Wuhan in April 2020, when the city reopened after 76 days of harsh confinement. Neither China has faced such high infection or death rates as the rest of the world, as it officially acknowledges only 315,000 total cases and 5,233 deaths, nor has it prepared to reopen.
In the face of the virus, isolation was his only protection. Closed since March 2020, the borders only opened for business and study visas during the summer, but with quarantines on arrival that have gone from 21 to eight days. Similarly, the authorities in the country have entrusted everything to prevention and not mitigation.
Since the outbreak forced Shanghai to shut down two months before summer, PCR tests have been mandatory every two or three days, with their huge financial cost. As calculated in May by the consulting firm Soochow Securities, all first- and second-tier cities, with a population of 500 million, will spend 1.45 trillion yuan ($205,000 million) on PCR testing in one year. This amount corresponds to 70% of the health budget, which amounts to 2.1 trillion yuan (296,000 million euros) this year.
In addition to testing, giant isolation camps have been built across the country to confine the infected and their contacts in alienating modular containers. With an estimated capacity of 90,000 people, the largest of them all has been built in the southern industrial city of Canton (Guangzhou), which is suffering one of the largest outbreaks and where authorities are setting up field hospitals with 250,000 beds. With a population of 20 million, Guangzhou is at the heart of the “global factory” and is one of China’s economic engines, which is why it has become one of the main centers of protests.
As happened during the quarantine in Shanghai, when GDP grew only 0.4% in the second quarter, another setback is expected for the fourth quarter, partly because exports, the main pillar of the economy, have fallen. With 400 million residents in 48 cities subject to restrictions and restrictions, the consulting firm Nomura calculates that the affected areas together account for 20% of China’s GDP.
The problem is that the reopening, which Nomura expects for next spring after the annual meeting of the National Assembly, will also be turbulent as infections and deaths will spiral out of control. With the pandemic stopped with so many controls, neither vaccination nor sanitation reinforcement have been seen as an emergency so far as social fatigue pushes for reopening. Like a whiting biting its tail, authorities have invested more in prevention measures rather than increasing the number of hospitals, beds and doctors to reduce Covid.
With large differences between cities and rural areas, China has 4.53 ICU beds per 100,000 inhabitants, as well as 2.41 doctors and 3.34 nurses per thousand people. For the same share, there are 33.9 IC beds, 4.3 doctors and 13.95 nurses in Germany. If the health system collapsed in Germany and the rest of the developed countries, it could be a catastrophe in China. According to a study by the Universities of Fudan-Shanghai and Indiana and the United States National Institutes of Health, without countermeasures or antiviral drugs, there would be 112 million infections and 1.5 million deaths, of which a third would be over 60 years old. not yet vaccinated. Aside from the Covid 0 protests, that would be the real threat to the regime.
Source: La Verdad
I am an experienced and passionate journalist with a strong track record in news website reporting. I specialize in technology coverage, breaking stories on the latest developments and trends from around the world. Working for Today Times Live has given me the opportunity to write thought-provoking pieces that have caught the attention of many readers.
