Senior Doctor Fears 70% Of Shanghai's 25 Million Population May Have Contracted COVID

State media reported Tuesday that a senior doctor at one of Shanghai's best hospitals said 70% of the city's people might have been infected with COVID-19 during China's terrible outbreak.

Last month, restrictions that had been in place for a long time were suddenly lifted, and hospitals and crematoriums were filled to capacity.

Reuters

Chen Erzhen, the vice president of Ruijin Hospital and a Covid expert advisory panel member, claimed that most of the 25 million people who live in Shanghai might already be infected.

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"Now the spread of the epidemic in Shanghai is vast, and it may have reached 70 percent of the population, which is 20 to 30 times more than (in April and May)," he told Dajiangdong Studio, owned by the Communist Party mouthpiece People's Daily.

During the two-month lockdown in April, more than 600,000 people in Shanghai got sick and had to stay in places for mass quarantine.

But the Omicron variant is already very common in the city, and scientists think the number of infections will peak at the beginning of 2023.

Officials in the Chinese healthcare system have believed that the pandemic's peak has passed in Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing, and Guangzhou.

Since the ban was lifted, the number of emergency patients going to Chen's Shanghai hospital has gone from 800 to 1600.?

Eighty percent of these patients had Covid.

"More than 100 ambulances arrive at the hospital every day," he said, adding that around half of emergency admissions were vulnerable people over 65.

On Tuesday, AFP reporters saw many people waiting outside the entrance to the Tongren Hospital in downtown Shanghai.

As millions of Chinese prepare to fly home for the week-long Lunar New Year public vacation starting January 21, officials are bracing for a virus wave in the underresourced rural interior.

On Monday, National Health Commission (NHC) official Jiao Yahui told state broadcaster CCTV that coping with the expected rural surge would be an "enormous challenge".

"What we are most worried about is in the past three years, nobody has returned home for Lunar New Year, but they finally can this year," said Jiao.

"As a result, there may be a retaliatory surge of urban residents into the countryside to visit their relatives, so we are even more worried about the rural epidemic."

She agreed that there was a need for hospital emergency rooms and offered to put together medical resources to help people in areas with low funding.

AFP

After Beijing announced its borders would reopen on January 8, over a dozen countries have imposed COVID testing restrictions on Chinese travelers.

Countries like the US have also restricted travel due to Beijing's lack of infection data transparency and the potential for new variants.

AFP

Since December, only 22 Covids have died in China, and early this month, the classification was changed significantly.

Jiao told reporters on Thursday that China had always provided statistics "on Covid-19 deaths and severe cases in the spirit of openness and transparency".

"China has always been committed to the scientific criteria for judging Covid-19 deaths, from beginning to end, which is in line with the international criteria," Jiao said.

(With AFP inputs)

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