Instead of promoting vaccination and strengthening the health system, Beijing has invested more in prevention measures that have suffocated the economy and rebelled the population
With how contagious Covid is, the question is not whether or not it will catch you, but when and how. The only remedy is to prepare with extensive vaccination and a reinforcement of the health system. With more or less success, that is what all countries have done to achieve normality, but, yes, after paying a high price in lives during the last two and a half years.
This is precisely what has not happened in China since the outbreak of the pandemic in Wuhan was stopped in April 2020, when the city was reopened after 76 days of harsh confinement. Neither China has suffered such high infection or mortality rates as the rest of the world, since it officially only recognizes a total of 315,000 cases and 5,233 deaths, nor has it prepared for the reopening.
In the face of the virus, his only protection has been isolation. Its borders, closed since March 2020, only opened in the summer for business and study visas, but with quarantines upon arrival that have gone from 21 to eight days. In the same way, within the country the authorities have entrusted everything to prevention and not to mitigation.
Since the outbreak that forced Shanghai to close for two months before the summer, PCR tests are mandatory every two or three days, with their monumental financial expense. As calculated in May by the consulting firm Soochow Securities, all first and second tier cities, which have a population of 500 million, will spend 1.45 trillion yuan (205,000 million euros) in one year on PCR tests. This amount is equivalent to 70% of the health budget, which this year amounts to 2.1 trillion yuan (296,000 million euros).
Alongside the testing, gigantic isolation camps have been built across the country to lock up the infected and their contacts in alienating modular containers. With an estimated capacity of 90,000 people, the largest of all of them is built in the southern industrial city of Canton (Guangzhou), which is suffering one of the largest outbreaks and where the authorities are setting up field hospitals with 250,000 beds. With 20 million inhabitants, Guangzhou is located at the heart of the “global factory” and is one of China’s economic engines, which is why it has also become one of the main centers of protests.
As happened during the confinement in Shanghai, when GDP in the second quarter only grew by 0.4%, a new setback is expected for the fourth because, among other reasons, exports have fallen, which were the mainstay of the economy. With 400 million inhabitants in 48 cities subject to confinements and restrictions, the consultancy Nomura calculates that the affected areas add up to 20% of Chinese GDP.
social weariness
The problem is that the reopening, which Nomura expects for next spring after the annual meeting of the National Assembly, will also be turbulent because infections and mortality will skyrocket. Having stopped the pandemic with so many controls, neither vaccination nor sanitary reinforcement have been seen as an emergency until now, when social weariness presses for the reopening. Like a whiting that bites its tail, the authorities have invested more in prevention measures instead of increasing the number of hospitals, beds and doctors to mitigate Covid.
With large differences between cities and rural areas, in China there are 4.53 ICU beds per 100,000 inhabitants, as well as 2.41 doctors and 3.34 nurses per thousand people. For the same proportion, in Germany there are 33.9 ICU beds, 4.3 doctors and 13.95 nurses. If the health system collapsed in Germany and the rest of the developed countries, in China it could be a catastrophe. According to a study by the universities of Fudan-Shanghai and Indiana and the National Institutes of Health of the United States, without control measures or antivirals there would be 112 million infections and 1.5 million deaths, of which a third would be older than 60 years who are still unvaccinated. Beyond the protests against Covid 0, that would be the real threat to the regime.
#years #lost #China #mass #tests #isolation #camps