Three days ago, Lily Wang tested positive for COVID-19.
The 29-year-old, who is isolated in her small apartment in Shenzhen, is currently battling a high fever and sore throat.
Despite her own illness, Wang’s thoughts are with her grandmother, who has so far escaped illness thanks to her parents’ quick actions.
“My parents got my grandmother out of town on time,” Wang said over the phone between fits of coughing.
Two days after she dropped her grandmother off at relatives’ home in the countryside, both of Wang’s parents became ill.
Almost all of Wang’s work colleagues have also been affected by COVID, she adds.
Across China, those who can afford are taking their elderly relatives out of the big cities to protect them from succumbing to the COVID-19 wave currently sweeping the country.
“The COVID situation is really bad right now,” Shuwen Lu, 24, said to Al Jazeera over a WeChat connection from her home in Beijing.
Lu, who is also currently battling COVID infection, shared how her grandparents were helped from Beijing to a small village where the family has a house.
“Had they stayed in the city, they might soon have joined the countless elderly who are dying,” Lu said.
Reports of people contracting the virus, hospitals overflowing with patients and the country’s crematoria struggling to keep up with an influx of bodies have surfaced since authorities began lifting China’s strict COVID restrictions in early December arriving at their doors.
It was similar stories that prompted the sources who spoke to Al Jazeera to relocate their elderly relatives from built-up areas.
“My family has decided that the safest thing for my grandparents is to get them out of Beijing so they can weather the COVID storm safely away from the crowds,” Lu said.
In the cities of Fuzhou and Shanghai, sources there also told Al Jazeera of elderly family members who went to the countryside or smaller village communities to escape the COVID wave that has emerged since China abandoned its zero-COVID policy.
Older people are vulnerable
Elderly people are particularly vulnerable to infection with COVID-19, and two-thirds of those over 80 in China have reportedly been vaccinated, with about 40 percent having received a booster shot, edging into the current wave of infections.
Lower vaccination rates among the elderly are partly due to China’s immunization strategy early in the pandemic, when vaccines were initially prioritized for essential workers to ensure the economy would not grind to a halt in the event of large outbreaks.
Elderly people wait after receiving a dose of a vaccine against the coronavirus disease at a vaccination center in Zhongmin village on the outskirts of Shanghai, China, 21 December 2022 during a government-organized visit [Brenda Goh/Reuters]
By the time large sections of the elderly population were vaccinated, authorities had put in place the zero-COVID strategy, and their initial success in protecting people slowed prioritization for vaccinating all elderly people.
The zero-COVID strategy had protected China’s seniors from serious illnesses for nearly three years by keeping less contagious COVID variants at bay. The policy was protective, but also meant that immunity to previous infections was not built up in older people.
Now, with the rapid reopening of Chinese society, the strategy of the past few years has left millions of people poorly protected from severe COVID infection.
The reluctance to vaccinate in China – especially when it comes to the question of whether older people should be vaccinated or not – has contributed to a real storm of problems in the country.
Lu and Wang both said their grandparents were not vaccinated against COVID.
“Of course my grandparents are not vaccinated,” said Lu when asked. “Who knows what might happen if they get an injection at their advanced age,” she said.
Wang’s grandmother has diabetes and several other health problems and thought better of getting vaccinated.
“She is concerned, and my family is concerned too, that her ill health is not up to a vaccine. So why take the risk?”
Official figures versus reality
According to official Chinese reports and COVID figures, there is nothing to worry about.
The official narrative is that the abandonment of the zero-COVID strategy has been just as successful as it was when the same strategy was an indisputable principle of Chinese governance.
Director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases Zhang Wenhong told local media on Thursday he has visited several nursing homes in Shanghai and the number of elderly people struggling with severe symptoms is small. Wenhong said he expects the peak of infections to be reached within a week.
China officially reported 4,128 new symptomatic cases and no new deaths on Friday. Overall, there have only been a handful of COVID-related deaths since restrictions were lifted earlier this month, according to official figures.
This story stands in sharp contrast to the images shared on social media and reports of the overwhelmed crematoria, overcrowded hospitals, the establishment of fever centers – to relieve hospitals – and the hoarding of flu drugs.
Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing estimates by China’s top health authority, that nearly 37 million people in China could have contracted COVID-19 in a single day this week.
People queue to buy antigen test kits for the coronavirus disease at a pharmacy in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China, 19 December 2022 [China Daily via Reuters]
Throughout their handling of COVID, the Chinese authorities have tended to paint an incomplete picture of the situation in order to present the leadership’s decisions in the best possible light, said associate professor Yao-Yuan Yeh, of sinology at the University of St United States.
“Therefore, despite the current chaos, it is very unlikely that the Chinese government will admit any mistakes in the zero-COVID strategy or in the subsequent opening up of society,” Yao-Yuan Yeh said.
“On the contrary, they will emphasize the elements that make their policy appear a success, while downplaying or simply omitting incidents that indicate failure,” he said.
The omission of facts pointing to failure was seen this week when a leading Chinese medical expert announced that only deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure after contracting COVID would henceforth be classified as COVID-19 deaths would.
The classification change has been criticized by disease experts outside of China, who said the new classification would result in a significant undercounting of the true number of COVID deaths – something Chinese authorities have been accused of since the outbreak first erupted in Wuhan in 2019.
“This time around, the authorities are concerned with underestimating the numbers that suggest the Chinese government has moved from a crisis caused by the zero-COVID policy to a new crisis caused by the rapid dismantling of the zero -COVID was caused. COVID policy,” said Yao-Yuan Yeh.
In Shenzhen, Wang only hopes that the crises will end soon so that she can experience life without COVID again.
“And I hope my grandmother will live to see it too,” she said.