China’s New Stage of Covid Management

Since the announcement of reducing Covid-19 management level from Category-1 to Category-2, we can safely say that Covid-19 has ended in China, or is it just about to start? With various measures lifted, we are now entering a new stage. People are now responsible for their own health, and the number of cases has since surged significantly.

Personally I live in Beijing, I believe that the peak of infection has passed for Beijing. We can see people eating out at restaurant and traffic on the road has also returned. Yet at the same time we hear a lot about hospitals and funeral services being overwhelmed.

Officials have stated that currently patients occupy about 60% of all the hospital beds available. Other related hospital supplies and medicine are sufficient also. This is wildly discrepant from reality. On CCTV, China’s state television, there was an interview with a hospital staff in Beijing, saying that they are now working 16 hour-shifts. In-patients numbers have surged from 3~400 on a regular day to 650, which is nearly doubled. This process seems inevitable, which the rest of the world walked 2 years ago.

At the same time we see people returning to restaurants and shopping malls, yet China seems to unprepared. Hospitals are crowded as well as funeral homes, many elderly are now passing away because of Covid-19. Also we can expect a huge wave of population migration from the cities to the rural areas of China, where health care system is least prepared and full of elderly in the coming Chinese New Year holidays. We can only hope for the best.

Speaking of people migration, these checkpoints once near every provincial and even city borders are now removed and people can move freely. These checkpoints and local measures were a special view in the past. With central government giving out various orders, local officials were extremely creative in circumventing them, given the supreme order of ‘Zero-Covid’ by President Xi himself. Political considerations and endeavors triumphed, and we saw too many new words being coined for this purpose.

First, central government ordered ‘no lockdown’ earlier this year, and local government used the term ‘silent management’, which is in effect exactly the same as city-wide lockdown. Sad stories about collateral damage and human rights abuse were rampant during so called ‘silent management’ of many cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Urumqi. Second, at a more detailed level, they stopped tracing ‘next-level-close-contact’ officially about 2 months ago. I personally were called the new term ‘high-risk-personnel’ by community official after watching a Conan movie at a nearby theatre. Apparently they were trying to slow the rate of infection by classifying theatre, karaoke and gym etc as ‘high-rish-venue’. Me and my wife were then ‘sentenced’ to a 7-day house quarantine to which we did not give our consent. This 7-day was horrible for me mentally, and only worse for our pet, a little puppy called Haishen. We could only file a complaint which will not give any response whatsoever.

Another hot topic now is the ‘white lung’, which is CT scan results give white fabric-ish images of the lungs. This has cause much panic and fear among the people who are feeling chest pain as part of the syndromes. ‘White lung’, infection in lungs, inflammatory cardiomyopathy and some other more serious syndromes are seemingly everywhere. Some would say that they don’t know anyone being serious infected. But we do see long queues at hospital and funeral houses. I think this kind of statement is not intentional to make things appear better. The main reason for many to make such statement is that China is a much populous nation. There are over 20 million people in Beijing and we have over a dozen cities with more than 5 million population. It is possible for many to not personally feel or experience closed-ones being seriously infected.

On the other hand many countries are acting swiftly to protect themselves from China’s Covid situation. Again given this huge population base, it is possible that new variants can emerge. It is difficult to be certain that the current variant in China is Omicron since many countries have described Omicron as a more mild variant. With so many serious and even death cases, rumours are going around saying that the original virus or Delta are on the loose in China. Anyways, all other measures are now gone and people only need a 48-hour negative PCR test result to go into China after Jan 8th, and search index on various online travel platform for international air tickets and hotels have surged 10 fold since. Some in China are now attacking this kind of policy. For the past 2 years, people inside China have been blaming international travelers for bringing in the virus, despite the fact that most of these travelers were Chinese nationals just trying to go home. Indeed it has been too difficult for them to go home for the past 2 years. With Covid-19 rampant inside of China, it is hard to say if these overseas Chinese can still see their older members of the family during the coming Chinese New Year. So I believe it is a good policy to ease up the measures earlier than later.