Fever meds in short supply, hospitals overwhelmed, blood shortage, death tolls soaring among the elderly, morgues overflown with body bags --Why China has a man-made crisis after "sudden reopening"
As China has had nearly three years to learn from other countries and prepare for reopening, how come it messes up big time?
Thought of the Day on China
Wang Xiangwei
Since China’s sudden U-turn on ending the zero-Covid policies more than two weeks ago, Chinese officials and state media have been struggling to put a positive spin on the decision. They have argued that the country’s draconian coronavirus suppression measures which basically isolated itself from the rest of the world over the past three years had won the population of 1.4 billion valuable life-saving time. The latest Omicron variants may be highly contagious but the symptoms they caused are mild, as they tried to reshape public perception of the virus, which until last month was labelled serious and deadly in the official narrative to justify the zero-Covid policies.
Moreover, they tried to give impression that the sudden reopening which occurred in the middle of winter when the respiratory viral infections usually peak, was planned and thought out.
Alas, the reality cannot be more starkly different – fever medicine in short supply, hospitals and emergency services overwhelmed, an acute blood shortage in many cities, death tolls soaring among the elderly, and morgues and funeral parlors overflown with bodies, to cite a few examples.
In a word, China is woefully underprepared for the chaos which inevitably came after reopening, as shown in other countries.
Here comes the question: since China has had nearly three years to learn from other countries and prepare for reopening, how come it messes up big time?
Before trying to answer that question, I would like to share the sad and harrowing experience one of my dear friends went through in Beijing on Monday when he tried to send his dying father to hospital and helplessly saw his father die without little medical care. With his permission, I have attached two videos he shot, which some of you may find disturbing. (For substack readers, I am sorry that I have not figured out how to upload videos. Please check out the two videos here:
On Monday afternoon (Dec 19th), my friend’s 84-year-old father who earlier suffered from a stroke started to shown signs of unwell. My friend who was on a business trip in Hainan was scrambling to catch a flight back while making calls to the 120 emergency hotline which was permanently jammed, presumably because of high demand.
At 10pm, his mother finally managed to get through and an ambulance of four emergency service workers came to his home within 10 minutes. After another ten minutes, they managed to get his father into the vehicle and headed for Dongfang Hospital affiliated to Beijing University of Traditional Medicine, a top tier level A hospital, located in the middle-class neighborhood of Fangzhuang (方庄) in the city’s southern district of Fengtai (丰台).
The direct distance between my friend’s compound and the hospital is 600 metres.
At about midnight when my friend landed in Beijing and rushed to the hospital, he was shocked to find that his father was still in the ambulance parked in front of the hospital entrance for nearly two hours.
He was told that the hospital ran out of ICU beds and oxygen tanks as his father was kept alive by the oxygen tanks in the ambulance.
After waiting for another agonizing hour or so, one emergency worker informed my friend that they could not wait any longer as his father showed notable signs of fading away.
So they decided to wheel his father into the ICU and tried their luck. In one of the videos, an emergency worker was heard telling an ICU doctor that the man was dying and could not wait any longer.
Eventually, they managed to get an ICU bed but his father died about 15 minutes later.
On the death certificate, the doctor wrote down the time of his father’s death at 1:59 am on December 20th, from sudden cardiac death.
Some of you might wonder why my friend did not ask his friends or neighborhood officials for help when he could not get through to emergency services earlier in the day. But help was difficult to find as most of his friends and neighborhood officials were infected and self-isolated at home. Moving a seriously ill person requires professional expertise. Sending his father to another hospital was also out of the question. Every hospital in Beijing was experiencing more or less the same situation.
Later on, my friend found out that families of the seriously ill were forced to bring their own beds into the hospital and one nurse told him that her workload was two or three times the normal and she was simply too weak to move an industrial-strength oxygen tank. She was told that no help was forthcoming that night as many of her colleagues were infected and stayed at home.
When my friend wheeled his father’s body into the hospital mortuary, he saw body bags lined up against walls and inside a warehouse as freezers long ran out of space. He was told to expect at least 7 days to see his father’s body cremated because all crematoriums are overwhelmed by demand.
My friend’s harrowing experience is not unique. Similar horror stories saturated social media platforms. One social media influencer has started a daily death count, showing that prominent professors in their late 70s and early 80s at Peking University, one of China’s most prestigious universities, died at an unusually abnormal rate every day.
As widely reported, China did a 180-degree about-face on its zero-Covid policies, lifting almost all controls because of mass protests late November. But the protests were just the trigger. The underlying issue is that China’s leaders have finally comprehended the magnitude of the devastating impact on the economy.
China’s lack of preparation for the reopening has been made worse by the fact that they have got all their priorities wrong from the very start. Beijing has spent billions of yuan on prevention instead of treatment, on mass testing and building massive quarantine facilities and makeshift hospitals. Just imagine how things would have been different if Beijing spent all those money and resources on beefing up the public health infrastructure including grassroots clinics across the country so that they could better cope with the surging cases.
As written previously in this space, the Chinese government messed up its vaccination strategy right from the start. When China first started to roll out vaccines, the National Health Commission strongly recommended that only those people aged between 18 to 59 year old should be jabbed, giving distinct impression that the vaccines were not suitable for people over 60, particularly those with underlying medical conditions. Its main rationale appeared to be that those people aged between 18 and 59 year-old would have to work and need protection against the virus while the elderly mostly stay home.
The NHC’s advice ran counter to the prevailing practice in most countries where the priority was given to the elderly and other vulnerable groups. This has subsequently made it very difficult for the authorities to encourage the older people to get vaccinated.
The acute shortage of fever medicine is totally man-made because over the past three years, the authorities had implemented strict rules to discourage people from buying over the counter with the aim to send all people infected to quarantine facilities and makeshift hospitals. That means that all pharmacies across the country have limited stocks of fever medicine and pharmaceutical companies have significantly curtailed production of fever medicine. Now the authorities have asked them to ramp up production around the clock.
Since the authorities have directed medical resources to mass testing and quarantine three years ago, hospitals around the country simply don’t have enough ICU beds and equipment to cope with the surging cases. Moreover, hospitals are in dire need of qualified and trained doctors and nurses to work in ICUs. Now the authorities are stepping up training and recruiting ICU doctors and nurses but this takes time, which they don’t have at this critical moment.
End.
The current crisis is at least in part a result of China's early success in bringing the epidemic under control.
In the face of a sudden attack by an unknown virus, it took the leadership great courage to lock down Wuhan and other places to track down, isolate and treat the infected and those who might be infected. The strategy of mass testing, contact tracing and zealous quarantining did work and kept China the safest place on earth for about two years in regard to Covid.
Then path dependency set in. The leadership got complacent and even cocky. They assumed that what worked initially would always work, making a firefighting strategy in response to an emergency of the moment the default long-term strategy for a protracted pandemic that just would not go away.
But their winning strategy eventually backfired dramatically. Regular people got fed up with the endless and draconian restrictions and began to clammer for opening-up. The economy got dealt with one devastating blow after another. Human and financial resources were being fast depleted for a strategy that ultimately did not work. In the process, the preparation for opening-up was almost totally neglected.
When the country finally opened up in the face of what the leadership must have felt were a sudden outpouring of popular discontent, both the leadership and the regular people were caught off-guard, much in the same way as when the virus was first detected.
People say that those who laugh the last laugh the best. China will not be able to have the last laugh in this pandemic. As the first to cry over the Covid, China is actually turning out to be the last to cry. A lot of lessons to be learned.
While I agree China should've spent more time to stock up on fever meds, those are ultimately just symptomatic treatment and doesn't affect the underlying disease. As for bolstering the healthcare infrastructure, local governments were already financially strained from trying to control COVID; had they instead devoted those resources to building more ICU facilities or training ICU medical staff, they would've lost control over COVID even earlier. Difficult to do both at the same time.