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Officials say a wave of infections has slowed and many others seem willing to move on. But new outbreaks can lead to more illnesses and deaths.
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By Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien
When China abandoned “zero covid,” accelerating a wave of infections and deaths, many feared an extended tide would spread from village to village. Now, two months later, the worst is over and the government wants to focus on economic recovery. .
Doctors who have mobilized across China to treat a flood of Covid patients say in phone interviews that the number of patients they are treating now has decreased. The towns and villages that collapsed the wave of infections and burials are coming back to life. Health officials said covid cases “had already peaked by the end of December 2022. “
“Now the pandemic is already forgotten from people’s minds,” Gao Xiaobin, a doctor on the outskirts of a small town in eastern China’s Anhui province, said by phone.
The true toll of the epidemic is hard to pinpoint, with infections and deaths surrounded by censorship and poor information gathering. Officially, China has reported nearly 79,000 Covid-related deaths in hospitals since December 8. But researchers say this is a drastic undercount because it excludes deaths outside hospitals.
The Communist Party hopes to triumph over those problems and focus on reviving China’s stagnant economy. Restoring the expansion could help repair the symbol of its leader, Xi Jinping, wounded after three years of strict “zero covid” policies, which had largely contained the virus still strangled the economy, and then its abrupt and disorderly abandonment in December. His government’s position now will depend largely on its ability to create jobs, adding a large pool of unemployed youth and graduates.
Xi issued a positive note even though he claimed that covid outbreaks remain worrisome. “The dawn is coming,” he told the country in a speech on Jan. 20, shortly before the Lunar New Year holiday.
Provincial and municipal leaders have said, one after another, that infections have peaked in their regions. Some of the toughest regions of China’s economy have published plans to restore business confidence. Speaking last week about economic revitalization to many officials, Huang Kunming, the leader of the Communist Party of southern China’s Guangdong province, made no mention of the pandemic at all.
The government has sought to shape the public narrative of the outbreak by restricting data and censoring critics of its response. However, anger is mounting over shortages of basic medicines and government obfuscation over the number of covid deaths as queues at funeral homes and morgues around the world. city flooded with bodies.
But for many Chinese, the imperative to go beyond the pandemic and make a living in a complicated society would likely end up overshadowing their grievances.
In phone calls to dozens of citizens across China, many said they were more concerned about finding work, rebuilding businesses and securing a long-term stay for their children.
“People don’t even communicate about covid anymore,” said Zhao Xuqian, 30, who said he missed his last job at a flour factory in central China’s Zhengzhou city and returned to his hometown in Anhui province. New task in the coming weeks.
“The new year has begun,” he said. We deserve to go beyond and look forward. “
While the Chinese medical government has reported that infections are declining, it has also warned that the country remains vulnerable to new outbreaks, especially in rural spaces where doctors are much scarcer than in cities.
“A new surge in infections is possible in spaces lacking doctors and medicines, which, less than 10 percent domestically, have not completed the full vaccination campaign,” said Gao Fu, former director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. China Newsweek magazine said earlier this month: “I want to urge everyone to set aside as many vital medical resources as possible for high-risk teams who are elderly or have underlying conditions. “
To restrict the number of victims of new outbreaks this year, China will also want to administer more vaccines and boosters, especially among the country’s elderly, and better equip hospitals to treat patients who have already had covid, several doctors and epidemiologists told me.
The next wave may not be as massive, but it may also focus its anger on vulnerable posts and other people they controlled to avoid infection from the recent wave.
Some Chinese fitness officials estimate that up to 80 percent of the country’s 1. 4 billion people were inflamed by the end of 2022. (Other experts are skeptical of this estimate, saying that even with the immediate transmissibility of the Ominon variant, it’s unlikely that it could have inflamed so many other people in such a short time. )
“Future death projections will be decided in part through China’s ability to protect those most at risk but still hiding,” wrote Xi Chen, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health who has monitored the covid pandemic in China. in an email. Answers to questions.
Covid outbreaks in China were defeated last year when the fast-spreading Omicron variant exhausted armies of local officials imposing lockdowns and restrictions. The country and the deepening economic crisis.
What surprised some was the temporary way Covid jumped into the Chinese camp. Like many doctors, Wang Guocai expected his village in southern China to be hit by infections weeks after the Omicron subvariant swept through major cities. Instead, the outbreak gave the impression of coming with force. just days after flooding Guangzhou, the provincial capital about two hundred miles away, he said.
At first, it was more common for other young people to line up at their rural clinic. Many were migrant staff and entrepreneurs who recently returned. Then, an increasing number of villagers in their sixties, sixties, and octogenarians filled the clinic every day, Dr. Wang said in a phone interview.
In December, he saw dozens of patients every day and distributed cough and fever tablets, he said, but now he sees only several a day. He said he was relieved that his village appeared to have avoided the deaths.
“Our village has been fortunate because, to date, there have been no fatal cases,” Dr. Wang said. Other nearby villages were less fortunate, he said, though he said he was not transparent about the exact death toll. They were all patients who had existing serious conditions. “
The official death toll in China is well below the initial projections of experts such as Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. In the past, he had estimated that the Covid outbreak in China could cause only 2 million deaths.
“I don’t think we have any idea what happened, beyond the moderate assumption that the actual numbers are much higher than the official numbers,” Professor Hanage said.
Instead, the Chinese have built a mosaic of impressions and how their places of origin have behaved.
Lu Xiaozhou, an editor from central China’s Hubei province, wrote online that 10 to 20 elderly citizens had died in his hometown of several thousand more people in the recent covid wave, and that “counts as a lot of luck. “Li Jing, a farmer and former migrant employee from Yulin, a rural domain in northwest China, said that while his own family’s older relatives survived the outbreak, other families were not so lucky.
“There have been a lot of burials in the county lately, I’ve noticed them,” he said by phone. Asked about the future, he said: “Now I don’t feel anything. I just need everything to go back to normal. That’s all.
The resumption of general life poses the threat of a new wave of infections, especially after the one- or two-week Lunar New Year break, when many rural migrants who had traveled to their hometowns for family gatherings begin to return to cities. As other people begin to move again, so can the virus alone, and those who have moved away from the infection so far may be exposed.
In the coming months, the coverage provided by recent vaccines or immunity developed from infections will fade, putting other people in new Covid dangers unless they are no longer vaccinated. There is also the potential danger of new, less virulent but more transmissible subvariants.
“The other members of my family circle were all infected, but I wasn’t,” Wang Xiaoyan, a resident of Ankang, a city in northwest China, said by phone.
She said she stayed in her own home and stayed away from parents returning to her hometown in December. He only joined his extended circle of relatives for Lunar New Year celebrations of dumplings, stews and fish after parents among them who had Covid recovered. Now he worried about what might follow.
“I’m worried, worried about being infected,” she said. I still wear a mask now, although no one else does. “
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