BAZHOU, China (AP) — Nearly three years after it was first identified in China, the coronavirus is now spreading through the vast country. Experts predict…
China’s unyielding “zero-COVID” approach, which aimed to isolate all infected people, bought it years to prepare for the disease. But an abrupt reopening, which was announced without warning on Dec. 7 in the wake of anti-lockdown protests, has caught the nation under-vaccinated and short on hospital capacity.Sign up to receive daily headline news from Ottawa Citizen, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.
The country has exclusively used domestically made vaccines, which rely on older technology than the mRNA vaccines used elsewhere that have shown the best protection against infection. While China counts 90% of its population vaccinated, only around 60% have received a booster. Older people are especially likely to have not had a booster vaccine. Over 9 million people older than 80 have not had the third vaccine, according to China’s official Xinhua News Agency.
The National Health Commission said China had 10 intensive care beds for every 100,000 people on Dec. 9, a total of 138,000 beds, up from 4 for every 100,000 people on Nov. 22. That means the reported number of beds more than doubled in just under three weeks. But this number “might be wrong,” said Yu Changping, a doctor at the Department of Respiratory Medicine of People’s Hospital of Wuhan University.
Potential shortages would depend on how quickly cases increase, and if those with mild symptoms don’t stay at home to ration resources for the very sick hospitals could still get overwhelmed, said Chen.To try to protect its health system, Beijing has converted temporary hospitals and centralized quarantine facilities to increase the number of fever clinics from 94 to 1,263. But rural areas may suffer, as the vast majority of China’s ICU beds are in its cities.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle predicts deaths could reach a million by the end of 2023 if the virus spreads unchecked. But Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the institute, said the government would likely be able to reduce this toll with renewed social distancing measures.
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