The wave of the coronavirus is spreading rapidly in China after the authorities' recent decision to abandon the "zero covid" strategy - an epidemiologist, advisor to the Government, warned today.
China's health authorities on Wednesday announced a general easing of sanitary restrictions after a massive outpouring of anger across China over three years of draconian restrictions, in hopes of re-stimulating an economy stifled by the restrictions.
The authorities have abolished large-scale systematic PCR-testing, allowed isolation at home for milder and asymptomatic forms of the disease, and more limited recourse to the prohibition of movement - "lockdown".
Shops and restaurants in Beijing are empty today while waiting for the peak of infection after the abolition of systematic tattooing, but there are long lines in front of pharmacies in Beijing as citizens rush to buy supplies of fever medicine and antigen tests. Some told Agence France-Presse that they had ordered drugs from pharmacies in neighboring towns.
"The epidemic in China is spreading rapidly and in such circumstances, regardless of the strength of prevention or control, it will be difficult to completely break the chain of transmission of the virus," Zhong Nanjiang, one of the main advisers to the Government since the beginning of the pandemic, told reporters today.
He said substrains of omicron are highly contagious: one person can infect 22 people.
China is ill-prepared to deal with a wave of infections, with millions of elderly people not fully vaccinated and hospitals unable to handle large numbers of patients
China has one intensive care bed per 10.000 residents, Jiao Yahui, director of the national health commission's medical affairs department, warned on Friday.
She said that due to the new wave of infection, 106.000 doctors and 177.700 paramedics would be sent to intensive care units, but she did not specify how other hospital sectors would be organized.
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