China's president admitted the seriousness of the new Covid outbreak

Chinese President Xi Jinping has admitted the seriousness of the wave of Covid affecting his country. He urged authorities to take steps to "effectively protect" his compatriots, in his first public comments since Beijing eased the stringent restrictions it had faced the pandemic for nearly three years. There are now, according to unofficial estimates, up to 250 million infections in China, the most populous nation on the planet with 1.41 billion inhabitants. Hospitals and crematoriums are overwhelmed. But the official figures, which until Sunday were only 6 deaths so far in December, have been suspended, without giving more data. Epidemiologists fear that a new variant of Covid will emerge from China, given the conditions that have been created.

"We should launch a patriotic health campaign in a more refined way" to strengthen "the prevention and control" of the epidemic and "effectively protect the life, safety and health of the people," said the Chinese president, quoted by the CCTV state channel. The Chinese president's statements come at a time when the number of patients arriving at hospitals is increasing; Almost all of them are elderly people and many are very unwell, with symptoms of Covid-19 and pneumonia, doctor Howard Bernstein told Reuters. The outbreak has revealed that in China there are many elderly and older adults with little or no vaccination coverage.

The current one is by far the biggest outbreak the country has seen since the pandemic began in the central city of Wuhan three years ago. Beijing's hospitals and crematoriums are overflowing, according to foreign media journalists, such as the AP, Reuters and AFP agencies, among others.

“The hospital is completely overwhelmed,” said Dr. Bernstein at the end of a “stressful” shift at the Beijing United Family Hospital, a private sanatorium, in the east of the capital. "The ICU is full," as is the emergency service, the "fever clinic" and other rooms, he detailed. “Many were admitted to the hospital. They don't get better in a day or two, so there's no flow, and so people keep coming to the ER, but they can't go up to the hospital rooms,” he added. In the past month, Bernstein has gone from never having treated a Covid-19 patient to seeing dozens a day.

China only officially recognized six deaths from Covid-19 since mobility restrictions and the requirement for daily tests were lifted on December 7. But this number clearly does not respond to reality. Hundreds of people must have died in Beijing alone since December 7, which is why it is observed in funeral parlors and crematoriums. In fact, on Sunday the National Health Commission of China, the body in charge of reporting on the pandemic, suspended the statistics. That day the Commission announced that it will no longer publish the daily numbers of cases and deaths from coronavirus, a tally that has been done since 2020 but which, the authorities admitted, no longer reflects the enormous magnitude of the outbreak that began after the government abandoned its “Covid-zero” policy on December 7, after a wave of protests.

“The biggest challenge, honestly, is that we weren't prepared for this,” Bernstein said. Sonia Jutard-Bourreau, 48, the chief medical officer at Beijing's Raffles private hospital, said the number of patients is five to six times the normal number, and the average age of patients is 70 years. "It's always the same profile," she said. "That is, most patients have not been vaccinated." A truly disturbing fact, if one takes into account that older patients are the most vulnerable and, in turn, in China there is a huge population of older adults, due to the demographic profile of the most populous nation on the planet. Jutard-Bourreau, who like Bernstein, has been working in China for around a decade, fears that the worst of this surge in Beijing is yet to come.

Elsewhere in China, medical staff told Reuters that resources are already stretched in some cases, as Covid levels among health workers are particularly high. A nurse in the western city of Xian said that 45 of the 51 nurses in her department and all emergency service staff have been infected with the virus in recent weeks. “There are many positive cases among my colleagues,” said the 22-year-old nurse surnamed Wang. “Almost all the doctors are infected.” Wang and nurses at other hospitals revealed that they had been told to report to work even if they tested positive and had a mild fever.

Jiang, a 29-year-old nurse who works in a psychiatric ward of a hospital in Hubei province, said staff attendance has dropped more than 50% at her ward, which has stopped accepting new patients. She claimed that she works 16+ hour shifts with insufficient support. “If the patient seems agitated, you have to hold him down, but it's not easy to do it alone,” she explained. "It's not a good situation."

More than 5,000 people are likely to die every day from Covid-19 in China, British health data firm Airfinity has estimated, offering a stark contrast to official data from Beijing on the outbreak. Last week, the Bloomberg agency and the Financial Times newspaper delivered overwhelming news, which ended the Chinese government's policy of silence: they learned, through an internal report from the National Health Commission, that there were up to 37 million daily infections in China and that up to 248 million people would be infected. The commission never confirmed or denied these data. On Monday, the commission also did not respond to a Reuters request for comment on concerns raised by medical staff.

China narrowed its definition to classify deaths related to Covid-19, counting only those involving pneumonia or respiratory failure caused by the virus, raising suspicions among world health experts. The definition is much broader in the rest of the nations. "It's not medicine, it's politics," said Jutard-Bourreau, a doctor.

That day the Commission announced that it will no longer publish the daily numbers of cases and deaths from coronavirus, a tally that has been done since 2020 but which, the authorities admitted, no longer reflects the enormous magnitude of the outbreak that began after the government abandoned its “Covid-zero” policy on December 7, after a wave of protests.