By Eduardo Baptista and Ryan Woo
BEIJING (Reuters) – After China scrapped three years of zero-COVID curbs in 30 days, setting off a large wave of infections, Beijing’s policymakers face an immense challenge to treat the sick and minimise deaths while winning back public trust dented by previous policies.
Scenes of overwhelmed hospitals, people on intravenous drips by the roadside and features of hearses outside crematoria have fuelled public concern. An awfully small variety of reported fatalities – 10 deaths because the old policy regime was overturned on Dec. 7 – and a choice by authorities to stop publishing data on cases have also stoked distrust.
With estimates of tens of millions of day by day cases and at the least 1 million COVID deaths next 12 months, global experts say the world’s most populous nation must bolster its medical infrastructure quickly. Chinese officials have vowed to step up protection for key demographic groups – including tens of millions of elderly people – boost vaccination rates and expand healthcare resources.
Experts say China has been caught ill-prepared by the abrupt U-turn in policies long championed by President Xi Jinping and implemented by trusted ally Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, be it the Chinese capital or the countryside.
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In December, tenders put out by hospitals for key medical equipment corresponding to ventilators and patient monitors were two to 3 times higher than in previous months, in response to a Reuters review，suggesting hospitals across the country were scrambling to plug shortages.
China’s COVID policy, especially on the grassroots level, is in chaos as a consequence of crunches in medical supplies and the sheer variety of sick elderly people, said Alfred Wu, associate professor on the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy on the National University of Singapore.
“This could be very much an unprecedented emergency now, due to healthcare crunch that has happened all over the place, at different levels, even in Beijing,” Wu said.
“More fundamental, and more subtle and more vital is the social contract and social trust in China. It’s imagined to be very high and imagined to help the federal government cope with many challenges but now the difficulty is we do not understand how much faith people have in the federal government.”
The State Council Information Office, which handles media queries for the federal government, didn’t reply to Reuters requests for comment.
Over the past three years, Vice Premier Sun, 72, has been the face of China’s COVID fight, a mother-like figure who has executed Xi’s zero-COVID policy with a firm hand.
On Jan. 22, 2020, while visiting the central city of Wuhan where the brand new coronavirus was first found, Sun told local cadres to implement the “strictest” counter-epidemic measures. A day later, town of over 13 million was thrown right into a lockdown – the primary of many across China that sparked anger and protests.
In April this 12 months, Sun rushed to Shanghai as town went under lockdown, in response to state media reports. At the top of a one-month stay, Sun said it was not the time for town of 25 million to chill out. The lockdown continued for one more month.
Trusted by Xi, the previous factory employee has taken blows for his COVID policies.
In 2020, while inspecting a high-rise condominium in Wuhan, her group was heckled by residents under lockdown. “It’s fake! It’s fake!” they yelled from their windows, accusing officials of staging grocery deliveries to coincide along with her visit.
In the course of the Shanghai lockdown, while also on an inspection tour, Sun was bombarded by pleas from residents shouting from their windows: “No more rice! No more cooking oil! Please take us with you! Don’t leave us!”
Sun will step down in March during a Cabinet reshuffle that also involves many other top government officials. She can be past the everyday retirement age of 68.
“From a political perspective, she has faithfully obeyed the orders of President Xi,” said Yanzhong Huang, senior fellow for global health on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an independent U.S. think tank.
In accordance with minutes of a COVID teleconference amongst top policymakers seen by Reuters and confirmed by a source with knowledge of the meeting on Dec. 25, Li Qiang, the previous Communist Party chief of Shanghai who oversaw town’s two-month lockdown, spoke as the brand new head of a small but powerful policy-deciding group on COVID.
Li is a detailed ally of Xi’s and was recently elected to the No.2 position on the seven-man Standing Committee, the head of power inside the Communist Party.
How the present infections are tackled remain a key near-term challenge to COVID czars.
“If they can not do an excellent job in handling the surge of cases and this results in mass die-off, that fear and panic could be a challenge to social and political stability,” CFR’s Huang said.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista and Ryan Woo; Editing by Lincoln Feast.)
Copyright 2022 Thomson Reuters.
