Covid-19 cases soar in China after easing of restrictions

The number of Covid-19 patients is skyrocketing in Beijing, the Chinese authorities reported on Monday, following the decision last week to relax the sanitary restrictions that until now had allowed the country to contain the epidemic.

Until early December, only a few Beijing residents knew someone close to them who had been infected, but this appears to be changing, according to posts on social media and data collected by AFP journalists.

In the capital, authorities said Monday that more than 22,000 patients had visited the hospitals from Beijing the day before, 16 times more than the previous Sunday.

“The trend of rapid spread of the epidemic in Beijing continues,” Li Ang, a spokesman for the city’s health department, told reporters. “The number of consultations for fever and flu states has increased significantly, and the number of calls (…) to the emergency services has skyrocketed,” she added.

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China announced on Wednesday the end of its strict “Covid zero” health policy, ending large-scale lockdowns and stopping systematically placing positive people in highly criticized 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 reported this Monday 8,626 new cases Covid premises, a figure probably much lower than the real one because PCR tests are no longer mandatory and people do not usually report the results of self-tests.

Since last week, it is difficult to find cold and fever medicines in pharmacies in Beijing and the same goes for Covid self-tests.

According to messages on social networks, there are also peaks of infection in smaller cities such as Baoding, in the province of Hebei (north), or Dazhou, in Sichuan (southwest). AFP could not immediately verify this information.

End of tracking application

Another sign of the change in health policy is the announcement on Monday of the deactivation of the main movement control application, which was used to check if people had transited through an area affected by the virus.

The application, called Travel Map, controlled the user’s movements based on telephone data and showed the cities they had visited in the last seven days. Depending on that information, he could access or not a hotel, a building or a shopping center.

If the location was not classified as “high risk” (ie with a high number of cases), the app would display a green arrow, meaning the user was allowed entry.

The application, dependent on the central government, will be deactivated as of Tuesday midnight, after more than two and a half years of service, according to an official statement.

Along with this application, of national scope that was already used before the epidemic to control interprovincial movements, there are local applications that continue to work and are used daily to enter restaurants, shops and buildings.

Bye! This marks the end of an era,” a user on the Weibo social network said Monday.

China will now have to live with the coronavirus but it is unclear how prepared it is for the current wave of infections.

One of China’s most respected figures in the fight against Covid-19, respiratory disease specialist Zhong Nanshan, said on Sunday that the omicron variant was “spreading rapidly.”