Covid in China: infected elderly people fill hospitals

Connected to a breathing tube under several blankets, a man infected with COVID-19 he groans on a stretcher in the emergency room of a hospital in Chongqing, central China.

In this city, and all over the country, the virus rebounds. The authorities assure that the infections are impossible to monitor afterwards abrupt abandonment of the massive tests, travel restrictions and confinements enforced since the start of the pandemic.

The social protests put in the closet days agoor the policy known as Covid-Zero which Beijing has enforced to the letter since the start of the pandemic, confining millions of people every time it detected a handful of cases. The problem is that this policy has not been accompanied by mass vaccination. And now cases are rising dramatically with no contingency plan.

The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said Wednesday that the agency was “very concerned” about the increase in reports of serious cases of the coronavirus across China, warning that its low vaccination rates could cause a large number of infections among vulnerable people.

And he added that the United Nations agency requires more information on the severity of COVID-19 in China, especially regarding admissions to hospitals and intensive care units “in order to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation”.

But China has always been short on information, even if it denies it. And despite the fact that its hospitals appear to be filling up with infected vulnerable people, the Beijing regime has not yet reported a single death from the coronavirus since Tuesday, when he decided change the way of counting the dead.

China also does not accept being blamed for not providing information. The Chinese Foreign Ministry assured on Thursday that it has always “provided information in an open, timely and transparent manner”.

What variants are they?

More than 130 subvariants of the omicron variant have been detected in China in the past three months.

According to the director of the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, Xu Wenbo, the subvariants BA.5.2 and BF.7 they continue to be the most common infections detected in the country.

However, the circulation of subvariants such as the BQ.1 and XBB -dominant in the United States and some European countries-, so Xu predicted a coexistence situation between variants.

“Most are elderly”​

At Chongqing First Affiliated University Hospital, a paramedic confirms that the elderly man on the ventilator has covid. They receive you every daya dozen people, of which 80-90% are infected with this virus.

“Most are elderly”, he says during his shift this Thursday. “Many of the hospital workers are also positive, but we have no choice but to continue working,” she adds.

The older patient waited half an hour to be seen. In an adjoining room, the AFP team saw six other patients in bed, surrounded by doctors and concerned relatives.

They were also mostly elderly and, according to one doctor, “basically” covid patients.

Five are connected to fans and with obvious breathing difficulties.

Millions of elderly people in China are not fully vaccinated, which accentuates the fear of massive death in this group from the virus.

However, under new government instructions, many will not be counted as casualties of the pandemic.

Did he die of covid or not?

First, people who they died infected they were counted as deaths from covid. Now, only the ones they die for respiratory failure as a direct result of the infection.

“Older people have other pre-existing conditions, only a very small number die directly from respiratory failure caused by covid,” a health official said this week.

in chongqing, hospital staff can’t handle it moving elderly patients to different floors of the centre, dodging relatives and other anxious visitors.

A plant doctor confirms that a significant proportion of the beds are occupied by covid patients, but declined to give more details.

AFP extension could not log in in the critically ill respiratory ward.

Queues at the crematorium

In a huge crematorium on the rural outskirts of the city, a long line of vehicles I was hoping it was Thursday afternoon so I could park inside the funeral complex.

Dozens of relatives gathered in groups, some bearing wooden urnsbetween the roar of funeral gongs and the smell of incense.

Inside, families watch as the remains of their loved ones are cremated and carefully placed in metal urns.

Four families said their relatives They didn’t die of covid, but of previous illnesses. But a middle-aged man explained that an elderly relative had died after testing positive for the virus.

“I was constantly busy,” says a funeral home driver. “We work more than ten hours a day with very few breaks,” he adds.

“Recently, the number of cremations It was very high,” says an employee of another crematorium in the city. “You can’t put the bodies in refrigerators, they have to be cremated the same day.”

Far from hospitals and funeral complexes, Chongqing has returned to a certain normality, with pedestrians and traffic starting to collapse some streets.

A taxi driver surnamed Yang says many people have already been infected, including himself, his entire family and most of his friends.

“We had no choice but to do it treat ourselves home,” he says.

In his view, China “should have reopened a long time ago”. “Covid is nothing special. Most people just take it and move on.”

Laurie Chien, AFP

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