China's health system strained after zero-COVID ends

STORY: China is scrambling to avert a collapse of its public health system after President Xi Jinping abruptly abandoned the country’s strict zero-COVID measures to stamp out the virus.

At a public hospital in Shanghai, one 30-year-old doctor named Nora, who would not give her full name because of the issue’s sensitivity, spoke to Reuters.

The situation she describes is of a system straining under the reopening.

Nora says patients fight with doctors to access cough medicines and painkillers that are in short supply, that medics are overloaded, that infected staff continue to work because personnel are so scarce.

"Especially the doctors working in emergency department and infectious disease department, who have direct contact with COVID patients, they are in short supply. Because many doctors are on leave, the remaining doctors must take over to maintain normalcy in the medical system, the workload is quite heavy. But the requirement from the hospital is this: if you test positive, and experience mild symptoms, you should continue to work."

Four hospital workers told Reuters that insufficient planning for the end of zero-COVID has left them to manage a chaotic reopening.

And more than a dozen people, from health and policy experts to residents, pointed to the cause being China’s failure to vaccinate the elderly and communicate an exit strategy to the public, as well as excessive focus on eliminating the virus.

The people said that Beijing spent big on quarantine and testing facilities over the three years prior, rather than boosting hospitals and training medical staff.

China also declined to roll out Western-made mRNA vaccines, which studies show are more effective than its homegrown shots.

A recent drive to vaccinate the elderly has not met with instant success; government data shows the rate for adults aged 80 and older who have the booster shot is only 42.3%.

Alfred Wu is a public policy expert at the National University of Singapore.

"China resisted having mRNA (vaccines) and China did not spend a lot of efforts on vaccinations of old people. Instead, they spend too much effort on PCR. So a lot of observers already point out the cost of PCR almost equal to the cost of vaccination, why not vaccinate old people first? But you can see that China did not do that.”

China has only reported a few deaths since the reopening taking the total by Friday to only 5,241 deaths, low by global standards.

By Friday, it had reported no deaths for three days straight.

Meanwhile, people have been flocking to hospitals and clinics in panic after three years of government propaganda about the dangers of the virus.

And Nora, the doctor, says new infections are rising at her Shanghai hospital… though it does not disclose the data publicly.

"The hospital doesn’t have a perfect plan to deal with all the problems and the policy is changing every day. How can we make this process smoother? How do we ensure the people, including both COVID positive and negative patients get uninterrupted medical services? The policy is still undergoing adjustment.”

State media has defended Beijing’s approach while recasting its messaging, trying to highlight how mild the Omicron variant is.

China’s National Health Commision did not respond to requests for comment on how resilient the health system was – or the supply of medical staff; whether there were contingency plans to cope with soaring hospital admissions; or weather strict coronavirus measures had impeded improvements to medical capacity.

A health official said Friday in state-backed media that China is expecting a peak in COVID infections within a week.