As China faces a surge in infections after abandoning its zero Covid policy, its president, Xi Jinping, ordered Monday to “build a rampart” against the virus for ” protect “ lives in China.
Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, China has imposed strict measures that have spared those most at risk and those with few vaccinations. The power put an end to this policy and most of the restrictions on December 7, which had caused growing exasperation among the people and greatly affected the country’s economy. Since then, the virus has been spreading at high speed and the number of cases is exploding, raising fears of high mortality among the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable.
Many crematoriums interviewed by AFP have reported an unusually high influx of bodies to be cremated in recent days. This situation is largely ignored by the Chinese media. Hospitals are also overwhelmed, and anti-influenza drugs are more difficult to find in pharmacies.
“The prevention and control of Covid-19 in China is facing a new situation”, said Xi Jinping on Monday, quoted by state television CCTV. This is the Beijing strongman’s first public comment since the unexpected abandonment of most health measures. “We need to have a more focused patriotic health campaign (…) and build a strong bulwark against the epidemic”ordered Xi Jinping, without further details.
A million people at risk
This lifting of restrictions could lead to the death of around a million people in the coming months, according to estimates from several Western studies. China announced on Sunday that it would no longer publish statistics on Covid-19. They were widely criticized because of their total discrepancy with the current epidemic wave hitting the country.
Previously, almost compulsory PCR tests made it possible to reliably follow the epidemic trend, but infected people now carry out self-tests at home and rarely report the results to the authorities, which prevents them from having reliable figures.
According to the official report, the most populous country on the planet has recorded only six deaths from Covid-19 since the lifting of restrictions. This figure is largely underestimated, according to many experts.
Offbeat official statistics
The Chinese have noticed in recent days a glaring discrepancy between official statistics and the contamination of a large part of their relatives, or even their death. The large metropolis of Canton (South), populated by 19 million inhabitants, has thus announced the postponement “after January 10” funeral ceremonies.
Another source of controversy: under a new methodology from the authorities, only people who died directly from respiratory failure linked to Covid-19 are now counted as dead from the disease.
Some local governments, however, are beginning to put forward estimates of the scale of the epidemic. The health authorities of Zhejiang (East), south of Shanghai, ruled on Sunday that the number of daily contaminations now exceeded the million mark in this province populated by 65 million people. Half a million inhabitants are also infected daily in Qingdao (East), a city of 10 million inhabitants, estimated a municipal official quoted by the official press. In the capital, Beijing, authorities counted on Saturday “a large number of infected people” and called for “do everything possible to improve the recovery rate and reduce the mortality rate”.