China last week announced the end of its “zero Covid” policy
The number of patients with Covid19 has skyrocketed in Beijing, Chinese authorities reported this Monday, 12, following the decision taken last week to ease health restrictions.
Until early December, few Beijing residents knew anyone in their area who was infected, but that appears to be changing, according to data collected by AFP journalists.
In the capital, authorities reported that more than 22,000 patients had already visited Beijing hospitals as of Saturday, 16 times more than on Sunday.
“The trend of rapid spread of the epidemic in Beijing continues,” said Li Ang, a spokesman for the city health department.
“The number of consultations for fever and flu illnesses has increased significantly, and the number of calls (…) to emergency services has skyrocketed,” he added.
On Wednesday 7th, China announced the end of its “Covid Zero” policy, with the end of largescale lockdowns and the systematic hospitalization of infected people in quarantine centers.
In addition, it is no longer mandatory to present a negative result in a Covid test to travel to another province.
In this context, the Ministry of Health this Monday reported over 8,620 new local Covid cases, a number that is likely to be much lower than the real one, since PCR tests are no longer mandatory and people do not usually share the results of selftests.
As of last week, cold and fever medicines have been hard to find in Beijing pharmacies, and the same can be said for Covid selftests.
According to reports on social networks, there are also spikes in smaller cities such as Baoding in Hebei Province (north) and Dazhou in Sichuan (southwest).
Another change announced this Monday is the deactivation of the main travel control application, which was used to check whether people had traveled through an area affected by the coronavirus.
Known as the “Itinerary Card,” the application used smartphone data to guide citizens’ movements and show cities visited in the past seven days.
Based on this information, the person might or might not enter a hotel, building, or mall. If the location was not classified as “high risk” (ie high caseload), the app would show a green light, allowing the user to enter.
In conjunction with the central government, the app will be deactivated from midnight on Tuesday 13th after more than two and a half years of operation, according to an official statement.
In addition to this app, which has a nationwide reach and was used to control interprovincial movements even before the epidemic, there are local apps that continue to work and are used daily to enter restaurants, shops and buildings.
“Goodbye! This marks the end of an era,” a user of the social network Weibo commented on Chinese Twitter today. China will now have to live with the coronavirus, but it is not clear how prepared it is for the current wave of infections.
One of China’s most respected figures in the fight against Covid19, respiratory disease expert Zhong Nanshan, said on Sunday the 11th that the Omicron variant was “spreading rapidly”.