Ruminations: Failed Policies Home to Roost

"Hospitals bore the brunt of zero-COVID, and are now overwhelmed by an unprecedented outbreak."
"Patients who visit the fever clinic have grown several times compared with last week, and it's likely to go on for weeks or even months more."
Yan, eye surgeon, Beijing

"{China’s overall vaccination rate is high by global standards, but with underperforming domestically produced vaccines, a lack of focus on immunizing the elderly, and the time elapsed since the average person’s last shot, real immunity is almost non-existent in the population."
"Experts are predicting a difficult winter. But already, a sharp reduction in government testing is making the course of infection in China harder to track and predict. Official numbers suggest that new cases have dropped in the past three days, after slowly declining through the preceding week. But a week ago, asymptomatic new cases were reported at nearly eight times the rate of symptomatic ones. The current ratio is only half that, suggesting that many asymptomatic cases are now being missed."
"Anxious citizens and enterprising retailers rushed to stockpile drugs and personal protective equipment following the vice premier’s announcement, even before the formal lifting of restrictions. Sales of face masks were 682% higher in the first week of December 2022 than the same week a year earlier, according to online retail giant JD.com."
"Sales of cough, cold, and fever drugs rose 18-fold. Many of these products had been restricted until this week as authorities feared they could be used to mask COVID symptoms. The search volume for Lianhua Qingwen pills, a traditional Chinese medicine which the government has said is effective at treating COVID-19, was 2000 times higher than a year ago."
"Even as it downplays the severity of omicron, on 8 December state owned China Newsweek quoted government experts predicting a large scale outbreak in the next one to two months. Feng Zijian, a former official of China’s Centre for Disease Control, told the China Youth Daily that up to 60% of the population could catch COVID-19 in that initial wave. 'Ultimately, around 80% to 90% of people will be infected'."
Winter Surge feared as China lurches away from zero-COVID, Owen Dyer, British Medical Journal

Workers wear protective gear in a Beijing neighborhood placed under lockdown in November. China had raised hopes by slightly relaxing its zero-COVID policy, but cities have been contending with a surge in cases. Bloomberg via Getty Images

Emerging outbreaks across China have swamped hospitals, leaving them desperate to contain admissions following the decision of Chinese authorities to relax and roll back three years' worth of COVID controls. Public anger leading to unprecedented protests across the country by citizens fed up with China's stern controls, called for the resignation of Premier Xi and the dismantling of the Chinese Communist Party.

Beijing's unrelenting zeo-COVID policies finally enraged the population to the point of revolutionary fervour. And authorities blinked, announcing a dramatic loosening of testing requirements, of digital health passes, and quarantining and tracking. The predictable resulted. Medical scientists have warned that China's insistence on maintaining a hard control on the public in avoidance of COVID infections left the population with scant antibodies against the virus, unlike other countries where a significant proportion of the population were either inoculated with mRNA vaccines, or had COVID, or both.

China's vaccination record has been sub-par for the simple reason that their vaccines were hugely ineffective and they refused to import the international community's more successful mRNA vaccines. And just as most countries sought to immunize their elderly population first and foremost as the most vulnerable to serious COVID consequences leading to death, China did the opposite, leaving too great a number among its elderly demographic unshielded by vaccination.

With hospitals now reporting patient surges, medical staff themselves have contracted the virus in huge numbers. Sixteen times the daily average of a week ago were reported to have gone to fever clinics. China's health services system placed its focus on contact tracing and quarantines for the past three years instead of building capacity for COVID outbreaks. With 4.5 intensive care unit beds for every 100,000 population, the country is vastly underprepared to face imminent and ongoing case counts.

Major county-level hospitals are stocking up on medical supplies and intensive care unit equipment with hospitals ordered to expand their staff by 20 to 30 percent, along with establishing infection diseases departments by month's end. According to the National Health Commission, 90 percent of rural hospitals are to install fever clinics. Temporary quarantine centres are to be converted into hospitals.