American experts: The tsunami of the epidemic may cause millions of deaths, and the Chinese government faces a dilemma.
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| A pharmacy in Beijing has sold out of cold medicines. (December 15, 2022) |
WASHINGTON —
With the sudden relaxation of the epidemic prevention policy, various parts of China have received the first wave of shocks from Omicron, and the situation in Beijing is the most serious. Public health experts have warned that the current outbreak in China will be a tsunami that will pose severe challenges to China's medical system. The outbreak, which peaks around Chinese New Year, could kill millions. They also said that the Chinese government is now facing a dilemma. If it is liberalized, the epidemic will intensify, but if it is not, the economic situation will be severe.
On December 7, the Chinese government significantly relaxed the epidemic prevention policy and put forward the New Ten Rules, allowing patients with coronavirus to be isolated at home, canceling the negative nucleic acid test certificates for migrants from different regions, etc., but it has ushered in a large-scale outbreak of the epidemic and the public Panic.
According to a report by the British media Financial Times on the 16th, the staff of the funeral home in Beijing stated that on December 14 alone, at least 30 remains of people diagnosed with new coronary pneumonia were cremated. Another employee of Beijing Tongzhou Funeral Home, who did not want to be named, revealed that there is a great demand now, and there are new crown pneumonia deaths every day. We started cremating the corpses from the morning until 10 o'clock in the evening, and the cremation furnace couldn't handle it.
Jennifer Bouey, director of China policy research at the RAND Corporation, told Voice of America at an online discussion held by the agency on the 15th. Epidemiological models show that the current round of the epidemic in China will be a tsunami.
It's really just the beginning of the tsunami of the epidemic. I expect it to last for a few months, depending on the state of the Chinese medical system.
China's National Health and Medical Commission said that on December 15, 31 provinces (autonomous regions, municipalities) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps in China reported new confirmed cases. However, the number of confirmed cases given by the National Health and Medical Commission is only 2157. The authenticity of this data has been widely questioned.
Be wary of the peak of the epidemic before and after the Spring Festival
Huang Zhihuan pointed out that Asian countries and regions that implemented similar zero-clearing controls at the beginning of the epidemic, such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, will have a big wave when they just open up, and then there will be some small-scale epidemics. A modest case report.
The ceiling of the Chinese healthcare system will be reached very quickly, and models suggest it could be within 30 to 40 days, which is at the end of January, which happens to be Chinese New Year. We may see the first crisis related to the Chinese healthcare system, with infections There will be many ways (spread).
Huang Zhihuan said that the current outbreak will also cause many secondary problems, Although it is not directly related to the new crown, fewer and fewer people donate blood in the past few months. People are worried about Infection in asymptomatic cases, so now the blood bank replenishment is very slow. The
the rural health system will face severe challenges. The Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism of the State Council of China issued the Work Plan for Strengthening the Prevention and Control of the New Coronary Pneumonia Epidemic and Health Services in Rural Areas on the 16th to ensure that returnees and rural permanent residents during the New Year's Day and Spring Festival in 2023 can obtain basic medical and health services in a timely manner.
Many Chinese epidemiologists also believe that the current round of the epidemic will reach its peak within a month or two. Zhang Boli, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said on December 16 that after the peak in January and February, the epidemic is expected to return to normal when the spring blossoms. Li Lanjuan, director of China's State Key Laboratory of Infectious Disease Diagnosis and Treatment, said on the 12th that the epidemic may reach its peak within a month or so.
Zhang Wenhong, Director of the Infectious Diseases Department of Huashan Hospital Affiliated to Fudan University in Shanghai, predicted at the recent Huashan Hospital Epidemic Prevention and Control Work Conference that the peak of the current round of epidemics in Shanghai will come within a month, and it will take three to six months to overcome the epidemic as a whole. time.
Chinese social media Zhihu user and big data expert chenqi deduced a prediction model through the Baidu search index, showing that Beijing, Hebei, and other places have gradually entered the peak period of infection, followed by Henan, Hubei, Sichuan, Chongqing and other places, Shanghai will It reaches its peak around December 24, and the provinces on the southeast coast are the slowest to enter the peak period, around the time of the Lunar New Year.
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| Sick children and citizens waiting in line at Beijing Children's Hospital. (December 14, 2022) |
Millions of people may die The Economist released a
model on the 15th predicting that if the virus is allowed to rage, 1.5 million Chinese people are expected to die. In the most severe scenario, about 96% of the population will contract the virus within the next three months, demand for ICU beds will soon outstrip supply, and people over 60 will account for 90% of deaths. At its peak, nearly 2% of the working-age population would get sick and develop symptoms. But on the other hand, if the Chinese government is prepared to vaccinate 90% of the population with booster shots and has enough antiviral drugs to treat 90% of cases in people 60 or older, it can keep the death toll below 72,000. A study co-authored by Gabriel Leung, the former dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong, and released on the 14th showed that without measures such as large-scale booster vaccinations, the number of deaths per million people in China due to the pandemic after the loosening of restrictions would The number may reach 684, and based on China's population of 1.4 billion, the total number of deaths will reach 960,000. Huang Zhihuan pointed out that the biggest problem is that the Chinese government is insufficiently prepared this summer, with low booster vaccination rates, antiviral drugs, and the number of intensive care unit (ICU) beds per capita. My biggest question is, given the outbreak in Hong Kong in January and February, which resulted in one of the highest death rates; coupled with the exponential increase in cases before the lockdown in Shanghai, so many modeling studies have shown this gap, why? Didn’t China step up the vaccination campaign in the summer? Why didn’t the stockpile of antiviral treatment drugs be ready in the summer?
Huang Zhihuan said that until December 1, when Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan suddenly stated that he would change the zero-clearing policy, China was hardly prepared.
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| Dubai, wearing a hazmat suit, dismantles a containment and testing device in a residential area in Beijing. (December 10, 2022) |
In November, protests against the epidemic prevention and control measures and even the CCP regime broke out across China. Amanda Kerrigan, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, predicts that as the hospital nation becomes overwhelmed and unable to provide enough ICU beds or other services, not only for COVID-19 patients but for other patients who cannot be treated, we may see See more conflicts and struggles between doctors and patients.
The Chinese government will be caught in a dilemma, but it will deflect responsibility for Xi Jinping
Timothy Heath, a senior researcher on defense issues at the RAND Corporation, pointed out that as unemployment intensifies, people's livelihoods decline and consumers' purchasing power is insufficient, in order to save the economy, it will be difficult for the Chinese government to return to zero-zero measures.
The Chinese government is in a terrible dilemma. If it relaxes its prevention and control, many people will die. If it does not relax, it will be a dead end. At least the recent economic situation is quite severe.
He Tianmu believes that one thing that is certain is that, The Chinese government will do everything in its power to shirk responsibility for Xi Jinping. Xi will absolutely not tolerate any competitor who might openly criticize him, and he will make sure that those are locked up, he said. Given Xi's control over the media establishment, the blame will shift to Western and local officials.
He predicted that the Chinese government will tamper with case data in the next stage, cover up the death toll, and spread more false information to divert conflicts.
