The silence. Four days after the lifting of the main containment measures, Beijing paradoxically became a ghost town again this weekend, as in February 2020 or May 2022. In seventy-two hours, the number of people infected with Covid-19 exploded . No one knows the exact figure, since the booths for getting tested have disappeared as suddenly as they had been installed six months earlier and the authorities are advising people who are not seriously ill to stay at home. But, according to several estimates, around 10% of Beijingers (22 million inhabitants) are contaminated. “Almost 13%”, says the Solidarité Covid site, managed by French expatriates. The others, either because they are contact cases or out of caution, stay at home.
The street therefore belongs to the thousands of delivery men, as valiant as they are exploited, whose role is all the more essential since the pharmacies, taken by storm, lack self-tests and remedies for fever.
Salvation can only come from the Internet and its stooges. And again, difficult today to find self-tests, even on the Internet. Suddenly, it’s the D system. But the generosity of far-sighted friends wanes over the hours. ” It’s the panic. People are in great psychological distress. Impossible to find any box of Doliprane, even online,” testifies Sylvie Berger, president of the Beijing Home association. On social networks, however, you can now buy breathing apparatus.
The nursing staff not being spared by the virus, many hospitals are idling. However, the queues that had formed on December 7 and 8 seem to have disappeared. “Near my home, the hospital does online consultations and sends small quantities of medicine,” testifies a Beijinger.
“Everyone is responsible for their own health”
As a result, companies have gone back to telework. The delegation of the European Union which was to organize, Monday, December 12, its annual meeting on human rights canceled it at the last moment. In Beijing, classes take place remotely, but the absenteeism rate is said to exceed 20%. “And still, some sick students follow the lessons”, says a teacher.
Despite the chaotic atmosphere, the authorities are staying the course. On the evening of Sunday December 11, they even took a radical new measure: the removal of the application which made it possible to trace each trip – a green arrow at the bottom of which automatically entered the name of the cities, even the districts where the telephone had “limited” the previous seven days and which was systematically checked on arrival at the station or in the hotels. In the same logic, the cities no longer indicate the number of contaminations by district. There are therefore no longer any specific “risk zones”.
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