Xi’s government resigned to facing major pandemic amid worst wave of infections since coronavirus emerged in Wuhan
China on Monday acknowledged the first deaths since easing the strict measures of its ‘covid zero’ policy earlier this month. It was a matter of time, because hospitals have been full of citizens infected with the virus for weeks. The pandemic has exploded in the Asian giant as before in the rest of the world, and its scope is “impossible” to pinpoint. Experts fear that the country is ill-prepared for the wave of infections because millions of elderly and vulnerable people are still unvaccinated.
“The official numbers don’t tell the whole story,” said Leong Hoe Nam, a Singapore-based infectious disease expert, who says he expected a much higher number. According to him, the importance of covid may have been minimized by health personnel. As a result, if someone dies “of a heart attack after the stress of an infection,” “the heart attack will be the primary cause of death, even if the virus is the underlying cause,” he says.
The radical shift in health policies against the virus, even abolishing mandatory detection tests, has ended protocols that have been in place for nearly three years since the first cases were discovered in the city of Wuhan.
Now Beijing and its twenty-two million inhabitants have been particularly affected by an unprecedented wave of contamination in China, to the point that medicines are beginning to be missing from pharmacies. Some hospitals are also too full to receive new patients.
Since the lifting of restrictions, authorities have tried to reassure the population that despite its contagiousness, the virus is benign, contrary to official discourse since the start of the pandemic. The municipality of Chongqing (southwest) and Zhejiang province, bordering Shanghai, have decided that people with mild symptoms “can continue to work” as long as they take “protective measures”.
No tests will also be required to enter public spaces, from government agencies to businesses, except to access “special places” such as schools, daycare centers and nursing homes, according to information from the South China Morning Post newspaper. However, the number of cases in the area continues to rise, with authorities insisting that vaccination is the “most important measure to ensure protection”.
One of the country’s leading epidemiologists, Wu Zunyou, warned China was experiencing “the first of three waves” of covid expected this winter. The current one is expected to last until mid-January, mainly affecting cities, before travel associated with the Lunar New Year (January 22) triggers a second holiday in February. The third peak will occur between the end of this month and mid-March, when people infected during the holidays return to their workplace, Wu said in the economic daily Caijing.
In late November, people in major cities took to the streets to demand more freedoms in a blow to the president, Xi Jinping, who was even asked to resign after months of strict confinement and mandatory quarantines.
The difficulties caused by the enactment of these regulations, which have led to the inaction of the authorities in emergency situations, have exploded an already extremely tense situation in a country where large-scale protests are not common.
Chinese stocks fell yesterday and the yuan weakened against the dollar as investors feared rising covid cases would further weigh on the world’s second-largest economy.
Source: La Verdad
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