Covid cases in China have started surging at an alarming rate forcing the Xi Jinping-led Government to rush to create hospitals. The authorities eased the stringent curbs under the stringent ‘Zero Covid policy’ a couple of weeks ago.
China on Tuesday said only Covid-19 deaths from “respiratory failures” will be included in the official death toll, as the country witnessed a massive spike in infections fuelled by new variants of the Omicron strain.
At such a time, epidemiologist and health economist Eric Feigl-Ding has said that China and the rest of the world are about to spiral back into the pandemic wave in the next three months that is likely to see deaths likely in the millions.
He has warned that over 60 per cent of the Chinese and 10 per cent of Earth’s population are likely to get infected over the next 90 days.
Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist, in a series of tweets on Monday, said the situation in China was alarming that the country was underreporting the deaths due to Covid. He said deaths are likely in the millions in the next three months.
Eric is the Chief of the Covid Task Force at the New England Complex Systems Institute, co-founder of the World Health Network, and the Chief Health Economist for Microclinic International.
Sharing a video of a hospital, where bodies can be seen, he claimed the dead bodies were piling up in a single night. He said the summary of the CCP’s current Covid goal is: “Let whoever needs to be infected - infected, let whoever needs to die - die. Early infections, early deaths, early peak, early resumption of production.”
The expert said doubling time for the infection cases in China may not be days anymore, it is now possibly ‘hours’. He also said that R-naught - a value that represents the number of people a single infected person can transmit the disease to - is hard to calculate if the doubling rate is less than a day.
“Because it’s hard to PCR test that fast. The point is China and the World is in deep trouble,” he said.
Meanwhile, the massive surge in Covid numbers has overwhelmed the healthcare infrastructure in China, which on Tuesday said only Covid-19 deaths from “respiratory failures” will be included in the official death toll.
Beijing, which is hit by the BF.7 variant of the Omicron strain, has announced five more deaths in addition to the two on Monday, the first official fatalities since the Government abandoned its stringent anti-virus controls earlier this month.
According to health officials, Chinese cities are currently hit by the highly transmissible Omicron strains mainly BA.5.2 and BF.7.
Meanwhile, Beijing is experiencing a massive wave of the BF.7 Omicron virus.
According to one estimate, over 70 per cent of Beijing's population has been hit by the virus, which confined millions of people to their homes.
Those who contracted the virus included scores of Beijing-based diplomats, their families as well as journalists besides a vast number of the city's population.
For days together Beijing wore a deserted look with less traffic on city roads.
The striking feature of the crisis is that China has lost count of the cases as it stopped public testing for nearly two weeks.
As a result, people are forced to buy self-testing antigen kits which are now being sold in black at exorbitant prices.
Hospitals in Beijing are facing staff shortages and an influx of patients since the policy U-turn, the Post report said.
Many residents in the capital are struggling to get medicines, with long queues at hospitals and a spike in the calls for ambulances.
With confusion about the government's handling of the virus, there is a growing concern about how to protect millions of China's elderly people, the majority of whom have not been vaccinated.
The elderly, aged 65 and above, exceed 200 million people, accounting for 14.2 per cent of the Chinese population as of the end of 2021, the state-run Global Times newspaper reported.
Data showed elderly people who have underlying diseases and complications such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases are susceptible to severe cases.
"It's necessary to set up a hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system for elderly people, which could diagnose seniors and treat them better based on their health status," Chen Erzhen, a deputy head of Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai said.
On Tuesday, China's National Health Commission (NHC) clarified that only Covid-19 patients who die from respiratory failure will be counted in the official death toll. The clarification follows media reports that many more died after becoming infected amid rising demand at funeral homes and crematoriums, Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper reported.
The commission issued a notice clarifying how it is calculating the death toll from the virus in what it calls a "scientific and realistic manner".
The new guidelines narrow the criteria for counting Covid-19 deaths, removing cases such as patients who had a heart attack after becoming infected.
"Deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure resulting from Covid-19 will be classified as Covid-19 deaths, while deaths caused by other underlying diseases, such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, will not be counted as Covid-induced deaths," the Post quoted Wang Guiqiang, an adviser to the NHC and director of the infectious diseases department at Peking University First Hospital as saying on Tuesday.
Wang said Omicron, the variant fuelling the current surge in cases, was becoming less lethal and China was increasing the vaccination rate, which meant the pattern of infections and deaths were changing.