China: COVID Tsunami Recedes Bringing Relief, Pain and Heartache

When China abruptly abandoned the policy of “COVID ZERO”, hastening a wave of infections and deaths, many feared a sustained tide that would spread from city to city. Now, two months later, the worst appears to be over and the government is eager to turn its attention to economic recovery.

Doctors who have mobilized across China to treat COVID patients say in telephone interviews that the number of patients they see has now decreased. Cities and villages that had hunkered down under the tide of infections and funerals are coming back to life. Health authorities said COVID cases “already peaked at the end of December 2022”.

“Now the pandemic is already erased from people’s minds”Gao Xiaobin, a doctor on the outskirts of a small city in east China’s Anhui province, said by telephone. “No one is wearing masks anywhere. All of that is gone.”

The actual number of victims of the epidemic is difficult to determine, since infections and deaths are hidden by censorship and poor data collection. China has officially reported nearly 79,000 confirmed COVID-related deaths in hospitals since Dec. 8. However, the researchers say that’s a drastically lower count than the official one because it excludes deaths that occurred outside of hospitals.

The Communist Party hopes to leave these problems behind and focus on them revive the Chinese economyhit by lockouts. Restoring growth could help repair the image of its leader, Xi Jinping, battered after three years of strict “COVID zero” policies – which had largely contained the virus but strangled the economy – and then his abrupt abandonment messy in December. His government’s prestige will now largely depend on his ability to create jobs, including for a large number of young unemployed and graduates.

Xi struck a positive note while acknowledging that COVID outbreaks remain a concern. “Dawn is at hand,” she told the country in a speech on Jan. 20, just before the Lunar New Year holiday.

Provincial and municipal leaders have declared, one after another, that the infections have peaked in their areas. Some of China’s most economically powerful regions have released plans to restore business confidence. Last week, Huang Kunming, Communist Party leader of southern China’s Guangdong province, did not mention the pandemic in an economic revitalization speech to hundreds of officials.

The government has sought to shape the public narrative about the outbreak by limiting reporting and censoring criticism of its response. Nonetheless, Outrage has grown over the shortage of basic medicines and the government cover-up of the COVID death count, as lines at funeral homes grew and city morgues filled with corpses.

However, for many Chinese, the imperative of weathering the pandemic and making a living in a tough society may eventually overshadow their grievances.

In phone calls to dozens of residents across China, many said they were more concerned with finding work, rebuilding businesses and securing a future for their children.

“People don’t even talk about COVID anymore,” said Zhao Xuqian, 30, who said he lost his last job at a flour factory in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou and returned to his hometown in the province of Anhui. I was thinking of looking for a new job in the next few weeks.

“The new year has begun,” he said. “We must forget the past and look forward.”

While Chinese medical officials have noted infections are down, they have also warned so the country remains vulnerable to new outbreaks, especially in rural areaswhere medical services are much scarcer than in cities.

“A new spike in infections could emerge in areas without doctors and medicines, those – less than 10% across the country – who have not completed the round of vaccinations,” said Gao Fu, former director of the China Control Center. Disease Prevention, to China Newsweek magazine earlier this month. “However, I want to urge everyone to reserve critical medical resources for high-risk groups who are older or have underlying diseases.”

To limit the number of new outbreaks this year, China will also need to administer more vaccines and boosters, especially among the country’s elderly, and better equip hospitals to care for patients who have not yet had COVID. , several doctors and epidemiologists have pointed out .

The next wave may not be as massive, but it could focus its wrath on vulnerable places and people who managed to avoid infection in the recent wave.

Some Chinese health officials estimate that as many as 80 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion people will be infected by the end of 2022. (Other experts are skeptical of that estimate, saying that even with the omicron variant’s rapid transmissibility, it’s unlikely. likely that it could have infected so many people in such a short time).

“Future death predictions will depend in part on how well China can protect the highest-risk people who are still entrenched,” wrote Xi Chen, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health who has been following the pandemic closely. of COVID in China, in response to questions sent by email.

COVID outbreaks in China erupted late last year as the rapidly spreading omicron variant depleted armies of local officials who imposed lockdowns and travel restrictions. The surge became a tsunami after Xi lifted pandemic restrictionsapparently reeling from nationwide protests and the deepening economic downturn.

The official death toll in China is well below the initial forecasts of experts such as Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. He had previously estimated that the COVID outbreak in China could cause 2 million deaths.

“I don’t think we have any idea what actually happened, beyond the reasonable assumption that the actual numbers are much higher than the official ones,” Hanage said.

Instead, the Chinese have built a patchwork of impressions and stories about how they fared in their hometowns.

Lu Xiaozhou, a writer from central China’s Hubei province, wrote online that in his hometown of several thousand people, between 10 and 20 elderly people died during the recent COVID surge, and that it “counts as good luck.” “. Li Jing, a farmer and former migrant worker from Yulin, a rural area in northwest China, said that while his family’s older relatives have survived the outbreak, other families have not been so lucky.

“There’s been a lot of funerals in the county lately, I’ve seen them”he said on the phone. When asked about the future, she said, “I don’t feel anything now. I just want everything back to normal, that’s all.”

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