After almost three years of lockdowns, forced quarantines and mass testing, China abruptly lifted its tough zero-Covid policy on December 7th. The reason for the turnaround was that the infections with the new omicron variants were no longer as severe. However, experts saw the main reason being that the strict measures could no longer be maintained in view of the explosive spread and the protests against them intensified. In addition, the restrictions had increasingly weighed on the second largest economy.
Since then, the virus has been spreading at an unprecedented speed among the approximately 1.4 billion inhabitants. According to internal estimates by the Chinese health authority, more than half the population of Sichuan province in southwest China and the capital Beijing are infected, the Bloomberg news agency reported on Friday. However, it is unclear how the agency came to its estimate after the country closed its once extensive network of PCR test stations and the coronavirus app was shut down.
Only a fraction is disclosed
The development is viewed with concern abroad as China downplays the scale and severity of the infection wave. Health authorities officially report only a few thousand infections a day, while model calculations by the London-based research institute Airfinity currently assume more than a million infections and more than 5,000 deaths a day.
Bloomberg cited even more frightening numbers on Friday, citing internal estimates by Beijing’s top health authority: almost 37 million people could have been infected in a single day this week. Up to 248 million people are said to have been in the first 20 days of December. That’s according to minutes of an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission on Wednesday, confirmed by people involved in the talks, Bloomberg wrote.
The rapid spread is causing concern around the world that new variants of the corona virus could form in the country. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked Beijing on Friday to provide information. In a telephone conversation with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, he underlined “the need for transparency for the international community”. Neighboring India is also alarmed and is trying to prepare for a possible rise in cases in its own country.
German call to stop the flight connections
In Germany, the German foreign policy spokesman for the Union faction, Jürgen Hardt, called for a stop to flight connections with the People’s Republic. The exploding Covid numbers in China caused by the failed policy are threatening the whole world with a new wave of infections,” said the CDU MP. The Ministry of Transport in Berlin rejected the request. “In fact, there are hardly any flights between Germany and China,” said a spokesman for the ministry. “A unilateral German or EU-wide flight ban” is also “not effective as long as there are alternative routes via the Gulf States or Turkey.”
China’s health department, meanwhile, has asked provincial authorities to regularly analyze samples of the virus and report the results. To discover new variants, three hospitals in three cities each were chosen to collect samples every week. Once the genomes have been decoded, the results will be reported within a week. In this way, “possible symptoms, transmission abilities and pathogenicity of new variants with potential biological changes” could be observed in real time, said the director of the virus institute of the public health department, Xu Wenbo, according to the Xinhua news agency.
A million deaths feared
In any case, the World Health Organization (WHO) has canceled the global end of the pandemic because of the outbreaks of infection in China. “The question is, if a significant part of the world is just entering the second wave, can you actually call it post-pandemic,” Dutch virologist Marion Koopmans said this week. Warnings are circulating that more than a million people will die in China after the Omicron wave. The government has started to narrow the definition of death from the corona virus: the victims are only recorded in the statistics if the virus was actually fatal.
China’s abrupt policy change caught the fragile health system unprepared: hospitals are desperately looking for beds, pharmacies for medicines, the authorities are pushing ahead with the construction of clinics. Beijing, for example, has set up makeshift hospitals and central quarantine facilities and drastically increased the number of fever clinics. However, rural areas could suffer as the vast majority of China’s intensive care beds are located in cities.
Many omissions
Experts and policy analysts polled by Reuters cited failure to vaccinate the elderly and communicate an exit strategy to the public, and over-focus on eliminating the virus as causes of the strain on China’s medical infrastructure. China has spent heavily on quarantine and testing facilities over the past three years instead of strengthening hospitals and clinics and training medical staff, respondents said.
The vaccination campaign for older people that was launched three weeks ago has not yet borne fruit. According to official information, around 90 percent of the people in China have been vaccinated at least once, and the number is significantly lower for second and third bites. In the particularly vulnerable group of people over 80, only around 42 percent received a booster vaccination. In addition, only domestically developed Covid-19 vaccines have been approved, all of which are believed to be less effective than Western-made vaccines using the new mRNA technology.
