China is in fear of Omicron: Social media are full of reports of high sick leave rates and overcrowded clinics

Created: 2022-12-14 3:53 p.m

By: Christiane Kuehl

Closed PCR test stand: As the omicron wave rolls in China, the official case numbers – previously recorded by bulk PCR tests – are declining.

The government wants it that way.

© CNS/afp

China is in fear of the omicron tsunami.

Social media is full of reports of high sick leave rates and overcrowded clinics.

But officially the numbers are falling.

Because Beijing is simply redefining the numbers.

Beijing/Munich – Everyone is sick, but the official number of cases is falling.

This is how the situation in China can be described in a nutshell.

A rapidly swelling omicron tsunami appears to be raging, especially in Beijing.

Users say in social media that half of their friends or colleagues have caught Covid-19, they etch official zero-death statistics or want the zero-Covid policy back for fear of infection in the mask-free supermarket.

Blood donations are also said to decrease because potential donors do not dare to go to the clinics.

Videos show overcrowded hospital wards and deserted streets in Beijing.

Parcels are piling up on street corners that cannot be delivered because too many courier service drivers have Covid-19.

"An anonymous survey of 160,000 Beijing residents has revealed that a third are already infected with Covid-19," Huang Yanzhong, a health expert at the US think tank Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted on Tuesday.

The Beijing lawyer and former chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce in China James Zimmermann reported on his working day: “Video call with my office in Beijing with all employees.

90 percent of people have Covid (a few days ago it was 50 percent).

Some are obviously unhappy.

Many care for children/parents at home.

Our 'work at home' policy is now 'work at home if you're well enough'”.

According to Zimmermann, Omikron approached like a “driverless freight train”.

China: Signs of giant omicron wave contradict official figures

These are not reliable statistics.

But the signs of a mega-wave are unmistakable a few days after the surprising end of the strict zero-Covid policy.

The vaccination rate is too low, and hardly anyone in the hermetically sealed country has been immunized through an infection.

Forecasts of hundreds of thousands of Covid deaths appear downright optimistic, especially compared to around a million Covid deaths in the better vaccinated USA.

Nevertheless, the official numbers of new infections are falling day by day - as if the government had to justify its corona reversal with falling patient numbers.

After a phase with well over 30,000 new cases per day, the National Health Commission reported just over 7,600 cases for Monday.

And since today, Wednesday, the statistics have continued to plummet - with a simple trick: the authority simply reports infected people with symptoms, all others are dropped without replacement.

The number of current new infections was a mere 2,291.

The number of corona deaths has been zero for days.

Corona numbers: Absurd decline in the middle of the wave

The decline seems absurd given the personal reports circulating all over the internet.

Apparently, the bizarre credo applies: the fewer people we count, the better the situation.

This fits in with the rapid dismantling of the previously ubiquitous PCR test stations in many cities.

Pictures of hospitals in Wuhan circulated online, with signs in front of them advising people to only test themselves at home if they suspected Covid and to no longer do an official PCR test.

The official case numbers only come about through these tests: without a test, there are no infected people.

No matter how many sick people isolate themselves at home after a self-test.

Even in Germany, experts can only estimate the number of unreported cases.

The main Corona app for tracking every movement of every citizen was also deactivated on Monday evening.

The four state-owned telecom companies announced they would delete user data associated with the app.

This is good for the citizens.

"The hand that was stretched out to exercise power during the epidemic should now be withdrawn," Reuters quoted a user as saying.

At the same time, however, there is no data that could indicate a high number of infected people.

Practical for the authorities if they want low case numbers.

China: Only died “with Covid”?

Officially, something completely different is going on in the country: According to the Health Commission on Monday, the number of patients with flu-like symptoms and fever in the capital Beijing has increased 16-fold compared to the previous week.

One is reminded of North Korea, which in early summer was reporting hundreds of thousands of cases of a new type of "fever" every day.

China is said to have flown Covid 19 test kits to Pyongyang and also offered its Sinovac vaccine.

However, North Korea rejected this – similar to how China has spurned international mRNA vaccines such as Biontech to this day.

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When it comes to the death toll, Beijing now seems to be using a very generous interpretation of when someone died “with Covid” and not countable “of Covid”.

The debate about this was also being conducted in the West at the height of the pandemic, for example in the dispute over compulsory vaccination.

So then, whoever had “flu-like” symptoms officially dies of flu and “with Covid” from now on?

Can such a fogging strategy be sustained?

Nobody knows.

In any case, transparency has never been the strong point of the Chinese system, which is dominated by the Communist Party, and the citizens know that too.

Also, the term “dynamic zero-Covid strategy” just quietly disappeared from Politburo minutes and speeches by top health officials — without ever a clear admission of mistakes or an explanation for the sudden about-face.

State newspapers quoted health experts as saying that Omicron is no longer as dangerous as previous variants.

That's true in China as well as here, but Omikron has been dominating events in the People's Republic for months.

Experts recognize the problem: omicron is spreading throughout China

But not everyone is fully playing the game with the virus gone: The country's leading Covid expert Zhong Nanshan pointed out as early as Sunday that the officially reported nationwide declines in cases did not reflect reality, as many people stopped getting tested .

In reality, the omicron variant is spreading rapidly across the country, state media quoted him as saying.

According to state media, the former vice director of the national health authority, Feng Zijian, also assumed that 80 to 90 percent of the population would be infected with the virus in the medium term.

China's government announced the easing just days after massive protests against the corona measures erupted in dozens of cities across the country.

How does it go from here?

Citizens in Shanghai and other major cities in southern China, where the giant wave is only just beginning to swell, are looking with horror at the pictures from Beijing - which many seem to believe more than the numbers.

Beijing shows them their near future.

This is hard to bear, especially for the people of Shanghai, who stayed in lockdown for weeks in the spring, even though the overwhelming majority of those infected there had no symptoms.