China has moved to free up hospital beds as officials yesterday reported thousands of new cases from an outbreak of the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 that has put millions under lockdown and raised fears for the health system.
The country yesterday recorded 3,290 new COVID-19 cases, including 11 severe cases.
The total was down on Tuesday’s count of more than 5,000, but the highly transmissible variant is posing the sternest challenge yet to China’s “zero COVID-19” strategy.
Photo: Bloomberg
China, where the first virus case emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, has not officially reported any COVID-19-related deaths for more than a year.
Under strict COVID-19 protocols, the country previously sent all cases with any symptoms to specialist hospitals, but a steep jump in cases, which has led to the 17.5 million residents of the southern tech hub of Shenzhen being locked down, and restrictions imposed on Shanghai and other cities, has driven concerns over looming bed shortages.
The Chinese National Health Commission late on Tuesday said cases with mild symptoms could isolate at a central quarantine facility to ease pressure on hospitals.
“Patients with Omicron variant strains are mainly asymptomatic infections and mild cases, most of them do not require serious treatment,” the commission said. “All admission to designated hospitals will take up a lot of medical resources.”
Images of patients lying on gurneys outside hospitals in Hong Kong, where hospitals have been overrun by a surge in cases, have spooked mainland Chinese officials, who are now also rushing to build makeshift hospitals in some provinces.
Footage on China Central Television yesterday showed dozens of giant cranes assembling “temporary hospitals” in northeast China’s Jilin Province, which has reported more than 5,000 cases over the past week.
The province of more than 24 million residents has only 22,880 hospital beds.
As of Tuesday, 6,000 railway carriage-style hospital rooms — first erected during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan — had been put in place in Jilin City and the nearby metropolis of Changchun to deal with a feared influx of patients.
In addition to leaving tens of millions of people under lockdown across the country, the latest spike in cases has sparked long lines of people outside mass testing sites and tight controls at ports, raising the risk of trade disruption.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing
RSS