China is facing the largest wave of Covid-19 infections since the first case jumped in Whuhan in 2019. Beijing ended its Covid Zero policy weeks ago, driven by social discontent, and all expert analysts pointed to it they would face this health crisis once the restrictions were opened.
As reported yesterday by the independent Chinese agency Caixin, the rapid spread of the virus throughout the country has caused “an untold number of infections and deaths.”
This wave of contagion of the disease is affecting, above all, the elderly and people with previous pathologies. The first is what worried the Government the most since its vaccination rate is very low. According to data published by Bloomberg, only two out of five over the age of 80 are vaccinated with the booster dose. All of this is causing ICUs across the country to collapse and hospital morgues are overflowing.
At the same time, Caixin reported yesterday, pharmacies are suffering “an acute shortage of everyday medicines used to treat the symptoms of the virus, such as fever, cough and life-threatening illnesses.” Thus, at the beginning of December, lThe shelves of Chinese pharmacies have emptied Quickly as people rushed to stock up on medicines, according to media reports, social media posts and citizen interviews conducted by Caixin, many citizens have had to wait hours in line to get hold of “strictly rationed” medications. On the other hand, orders placed online “will take weeks to deliver.”
Such is the pressure that Xi Jinping’s government is now facing, that they made an information blackout and announced that they would stop publishing the daily bulletin of the evolution of the pandemic, where they detailed the number of new confirmed cases of Covid-19 and the deaths caused by the infection.
As reported by Caixin yesterday, infected people were controlled for months by the Government in quarantine centers and now they are “forced to fend for themselves” to look for medicines such as acetampol (Tylenol), ibuprofen (Advil), and Pfizer’s Plaxovidwhich is crucial for treating people who have the disease and are at higher risk of severe symptoms.
China has imposed strict controls on purchases of such drugs for the past three years, so pharmacies have only a small amount of them.
Desperate search for medicines in residences
Nursing homes in China are desperately trying to stock up on medicines. The director of a nursing home in Wuhan (Hubei province) assured Caixin yesterday that the supply of medicines that they have in their center “are only enough for 90 people”. Such is the lack of drugs that they have even asked the families of the residents to help them find essential medicines to curb the serious ailments caused by the virus.