Beijing (AFP) – Over the past few days, the emergency rooms of Shanghai hospitals have been overwhelmed as coronavirus cases soar after China reversed its restrictive “zero-Covid” policy.
Official estimates indicate that some 250 million people, almost a fifth of the Chinese population, caught Covid in the first 20 days of December.
A senior health official has said that half a million people in a single Chinese city are being infected with Covid-19 every day, in a rare and quickly censored acknowledgement that the country’s wave of infections is not being reflected in official statistics.
China this month has rapidly dismantled key pillars of its zero-Covid strategy, doing away with snap lockdowns, lengthy quarantines and travel curbs in a jarring reversal of its hallmark containment strategy.
Cities across the country have struggled to cope as surging infections have emptied pharmacy shelves, filled hospital wards and appeared to cause backlogs at crematoriums and funeral homes.
But the end of strict testing mandates has made caseloads virtually impossible to track, while authorities have narrowed the medical definition of a Covid death in a move experts have said will suppress the number of fatalities attributable to the virus.
A news outlet operated by the ruling Communist Party in Qingdao on Friday reported the municipal health chief as saying that the eastern city was seeing “between 490,000 and 530,000” new Covid cases a day.
The coastal city of around 10 million people was “in a period of rapid transmission ahead of an approaching peak”, Bo Tao reportedly said, adding that the infection rate would accelerate by another 10 percent over the weekend.
The report was shared by several other news outlets but appeared to have been edited by Saturday morning to remove the case figures.
China’s National Health Commission said Saturday that 4,103 new domestic infections were recorded nationwide the previous day, with no new deaths.
In Shandong, the province where Qingdao is located, authorities officially logged just 31 new domestic cases.