ICUs struggle to cope with China’s Covid explosion, big industrial province reports 1 million cases a day

Hospitals in Hebei are turning away patients and the infected are sleeping on benches in hospital corridors or lying on floors as concern rises over China’s Covid surge which might unleash a new Coronavirus mutant on the world.

China, which ended long quarantines, lockdowns and mandatory testing, is now experiencing its first-ever national Covid wave and ICUs are overwhelmed. Even though China has reported zero Covid-related deaths since easing restrictions, crematoriums are overcrowded, indicating the extent of the Covid surge.

In Heiei, the elderly are getting infected and it has caused an overrun of ICUs and funeral homes. At a hospital in Zhuozhou, ambulances were turned away as the ICU was so crowded, AP reported.

“There’s no oxygen or electricity in this corridor. If you can’t even give him oxygen, how can you save him? If you don’t want any delays, turn around and get out quickly,” a health worker told the relatives of a patient.

Some ambulances are heading straight to funeral homes. At the Zhuozhou crematorium, furnaces are burning overtime as workers struggle to cope with a spike in deaths in the past week, according to one employee. A funeral shop worker estimated it is burning 20 to 30 bodies a day, up from three to four before COVID-19 measures were loosened.

WILL CHINA’s COVID SURGE UNLEASH A NEW VARIANT?

Experts believe that low booster dose levels in elderly, ineffective domestic vaccines are providing a fertile ground for the virus to mutate.

“China has a population that is very large and there’s limited immunity. And that seems to be the setting in which we may see an explosion of a new variant,” Dr Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University was quoted as saying by AP.

“When we’ve seen big waves of infection, it’s often followed by new variants being generated,” Ray said.

“Much of the mildness we’ve experienced over the past six to 12 months in many parts of the world has been due to accumulated immunity either through vaccination or infection, not because the virus has changed” in severity, Ray said.

1 MILLION NEW CASES A DAY IN ZHEJIANG

China’s Zhejiang, a big industrial province near Shanghai, is battling around a million new daily Covid infections, a number expected to double in the days ahead.

The cities of Qingdao and Dongguan have each estimated tens of thousands of daily Covid infections recently, much higher than the national daily toll.

‘PANDEMIC NOT OVER’

Recently, the World Health Organisation expressed concern about reports of severe infection in China. 50 of the 130 omicron versions detected in China have resulted in outbreaks so far and China is now creating a national genetic database “to monitor in real time” how different strains are evolving and the potential implications for public health.

However, at this point, there’s limited information about genetic viral sequencing coming out of China, said Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

“We don’t know all of what’s going on. The pandemic is not over,” he said.