BEIJING – Patients, mostly elderly, lie on stretchers in aisles and take oxygen in wheelchairs as COVID-19 spreads in Beijing, the Chinese capital.
The hospital in Chuiygliu, in the east of the city, was packed with newly arrived patients on Thursday. By mid-morning, beds were exhausted, even as ambulances kept bringing in those in need.
Beleaguered nurses and doctors rushed to collect data and pull out the most urgent cases.
The surge in the number of other seriously ill people requiring hospital care follows China’s abandonment of its tighter pandemic restrictions last month after nearly three years of school closures, bans and closures that have weighed heavily on the economy and sparked street protests not seen since the expired 1980s.
It also comes as the European Union “strongly encouraged” its member states on Wednesday to order pre-departure COVID-19 for passengers from China.
Over the past week, EU countries have responded with a series of restrictions on travelers from China, ignoring a previous commitment to act in unity.
Italy, where the pandemic first wreaked havoc in Europe in early 2020, was the first EU member to require coronavirus control for China’s airline passengers, but France and Spain did the same temporarily with their own measures. This followed the imposition across the United States of a requirement that all passengers arriving from China must provide a negative verification result received within 48 hours prior to departure.
China has warned of “countermeasures” if such policies are imposed across the bloc.
Still, World Health Organization leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday he was concerned about the Chinese government’s lack of knowledge about the outbreaks.
At a briefing on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mao Ning said Beijing had “constantly shared data and knowledge with the foreign network in an open and transparent manner. “
“Right now, the COVID-19 scenario in China is control,” Mao said. “In addition, we hope that the WHO Secretariat will adopt a scientific, objective and independent position to play a positive role in combating the pandemic globally. “. “
The concise language between China and the WHO stands in stark contrast to what critics in the U. S. Congress are facing. U. S. They called an overly friendly relationship between the two as the United Nations sought to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
While the first cases were reported in the central city of Wuhan in China in late 2019, China claimed the virus originated in the United States or Europe and was accused of concealing information that could help narrow down the search for the cause.
In the face of the latest outbreak, China has sought to vaccinate more of its elderly population, but those efforts have been hampered beyond scandals involving fake drugs and prior warnings about adverse vaccine reactions in the elderly.
Vaccines developed in China are also less effective than mRNA used elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the local government in some spaces is asking the public to avoid traveling on this month’s Lunar New Year holiday, as the most recent official driving bans are lifted.
“We advise everyone not to return to their hometown unless it is mandatory at the peak of the outbreak,” the government of Shaoyang County in central China’s Hunan province said in a statement dated Thursday. “Avoid visiting relatives and traveling between regions. Minimize travel.
Similar calls were made across Shouxian County in Anhui Province southeast of Beijing and the cities of Qingyang in the northwestern province of Gansu and Weifang in Shandong on the east coast.
The Weifang government’s opinion says citizens celebrate the holiday with video and phone meetings.
“Avoid visiting family and friends of yourself and others,” she said.
Despite those concerns, Hong Kong announced it would reopen its border with mainland China on Sunday and allow tens of thousands of people to cross from either side every day without being quarantined. It’s unclear what restrictions other travelers to mainland China would face.
The city’s land and sea border checkpoints with the mainland have been largely closed for about 3 years and the reopening is expected to provide much-needed spice for Hong Kong’s tourism and retail sectors.
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