China's Corona Rural Chaos: Omicron Tsunami Reaches Villages Much Earlier Than Expected
Created: 01/14/2023 08:03
By: Christiane Kuehl
Country doctor in the village of Shaoji in the province of Shandong: Many older people in the countryside are without complete corona vaccination protection.
© Xu Suhui/Imago
China's huge corona wave hits rural areas much earlier than expected.
Even before the Lunar New Year on January 22, many local clinics are overwhelmed.
Beijing/Frankfurt – A good week before the New Year celebrations on January 22, China is preparing for a huge wave of Covid in the countryside: the authorities are planning local fever clinics and are asking doctors to take part in further training and to purchase the necessary medication.
But apparently the omicron tsunami has long since arrived in the villages and district towns - and has overrun country doctors and local infirmaries almost unprepared.
Getting concrete data from rural areas has been even more difficult than from the cities since China stopped reporting case numbers.
Only a few anecdotes result in a – albeit incomplete – picture of overcrowded fever clinics, lack of medication, overwhelmed country doctors.
Showing how early omicron spilled into the countryside is the example of Hongtang village in central China's Hunan province, which recorded its first Covid case on Dec. 9, according to a report by Hong Kong
's South China Morning Post
, when a returning migrant worker tested positive.
A few days later, students from different cities also came back to the village.
In mid-December, the local authorities began stockpiling traditional Chinese medicines, they had no other medicines.
530 people aged over 60 lived in Hongtang. “In the second half of December, many people aged 80, 90 and over died.
The deaths were very concentrated," the newspaper quoted a local official who asked to remain anonymous as saying.
A particularly large number of older people live in the villages
A major problem is that there are a particularly large number of old people living in rural areas, who in China are often inadequately vaccinated for fear of side effects.
According to state media, 25 million people over the age of 60 are completely unprotected against the corona virus.
Of the 240 million Chinese over the age of 60, around 75 percent are said to have been boosted.
In the case of older people over 80, however, it is only around 40 percent.
And hundreds of millions of city dwellers now travel to these elders to celebrate, eat and set off fireworks in the sky together with them.
The official travel season for the Chinese New Year celebrations – the largest annual migration of peoples in the world – has been running since January 7th this year and will last until February 15th.
People from villages in Anhui province, for example, also say that “everyone” there has the virus;
it sounds like the situation in Beijing in early December.
China: Rural doctors with no experience of Covid-19
However, the onslaught of patients with Covid-19 is something completely new for the doctors in the villages and small towns.
Because before China abandoned its zero-Covid policy in December, rural hospitals and clinics were not allowed to take in people with Covid symptoms at all.
The aim was to prevent the spread of the pandemic in the countryside - and for good reason: the clinics in China's rural areas are nowhere near as big and as well equipped as the hospitals in the big cities.
Rural areas have just 1.48 doctors and 2.1 nurses per 1,000 people , according to the
South China Morning Post
-- while urban areas have 3.96 doctors and 5.4 nurses per 1,000 people.
Even before the pandemic, many people hardly trusted the local clinics and even went to district hospitals for routine treatment, which often serve districts with millions of people - and are often overcrowded even without Covid.
A doctor surnamed Liu at one such rural county hospital in the coastal province of Zhejiang, the
South China Morning Post reported
that many patients came from smaller clinics there too – but he also says that the pressure was greatest at the end of December.
According to the report, Liu had been commissioned by the hospital to undergo further training in the treatment of emergencies in the intensive care unit.
He has also learned treatment with Paxlovid and Azvudin, two antiviral drugs against Covid-19.
"But the beds in the intensive care unit are far from enough," said Liu.
"And the drugs haven't even arrived yet."
China's corona tsunami already at its first peak?
Nationwide Covid infections in China could remain high for another two to three months, business
magazine Caixin reported
on Friday, citing recent statements by former chief epidemiologist at the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Zeng Guang.
The number of serious cases could increase even longer, according to Zeng.
The virus is coming in waves, one after the other, first in Beijing, then in Guangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing and elsewhere.
It is time to focus primarily on the rural areas.”
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According to model calculations, the omicron tsunami could have reached its first peak around Friday with 3.7 million new infections a day.
As reported by London-based data processor Airfinity, the number of daily corona deaths is then likely to rise to a high of 25,000 ten days later.
According to estimates, more than half a million people in China will have died of or with Covid-19 in the period since the start of the giant wave in early December.
Officially, it's only a few dozen in the last two weeks;
Of course, no one can take these numbers seriously.
Airfinity expects an even higher wave at the beginning of March than at present, which will then primarily affect rural areas.
Up to 4.2 million people will be able to get infected there every day.
The number of dead will rise to a total of 1.7 million by the end of April.
Many of the future victims are likely to be older people from rural areas.
(ck, with material from dpa)
