China’s hospitals are already under so much pressure, following the country’s rapid 180-degree turnaround in Covid policy, doctors and nurses could infect patients.
It seems frontline medical workers are being told to come in even if they have the virus due to staffing shortages.
A Chinese professor specializing in health policy has been monitoring the crisis in his native country from Yale University in the United States.
Chen Xi said that he has been speaking with hospital directors and other medical personnel in China about the current massive strains on the system.
“People who’ve been infected have been required to work in the hospitals, which creates a transmission environment there,” he said.
China’s hospitals have increased their fever ward capacity to meet a massive influx of patients. However, these have been filling up quickly, partly because the message is still getting through that it is all right to stay at home if you catch the virus.
Prof Chen says much 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 hospitals, which may easily crash the healthcare system.”
A rush on pharmacies has led to significant nationwide shortages of medicine used to treat a cold or the flu. Home testing kits for Covid-19 are also hard to come by.
In Beijing, though restaurants are allowed to open again, they have very few customers, and the streets are quiet.
Companies tell employees they should return to the office, but many don’t want to.
This all makes sense when you consider that, just weeks ago, the government was saying that there would be no swerving from zero-Covid, that those infected must go to centralised quarantine facilities and that lockdowns were necessary.
The coronavirus was something to fear, and Chinese people were lucky to live here because the Communist Party would not sacrifice them on the altar of opening up.
Now the goal of returning each outbreak to zero cases has been abandoned, Covid-19 is spreading like wildfire, and the line from the government is that catching this disease is not something to worry about.
China’s easing of Covid restrictions was expected to unfold more slowly, much more gradually.
Then came street protests, in the city after city, with demonstrators demanding their old lives back. They wanted to be free to move around again. There were clashes with police, and the chant was going up for China’s leader Xi Jinping to resign and for the Communist Party to give up power