According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hospitals in China appear to be filling up amid fears that a new wave of Covid-19 will hit the country. Dr. Michael Ryan says intensive care units (ICUs) are busy, but officials say their numbers are “relatively low.” Chinese figures show no one has died from Covid as of Wednesday, but there is skepticism about the true impact of the disease. Hospitals in Beijing and other cities have been overwhelmed in recent days as the latest coronavirus outbreak hits China. Since 2020, China has imposed strict health restrictions as part of its zero Covid policy. But the government ended most of these measures two weeks ago after pioneering protests against the draconian restrictions. Since then, the number of cases has skyrocketed, raising concerns about a high mortality rate, especially among at-risk older people.
Despite the surge, only five people died from Covid on Tuesday and two on Monday, according to official figures. This prompted WHO emergency chief Dr. Ryan to ask China to provide more information about the recent spread of the virus. He said: “Although relatively few cases in intensive care units have been reported in China, anecdotally, intensive care units are filling up. “We have been saying for weeks that it will always be very difficult to completely stop this highly contagious virus through public health and social action alone.” At a weekly press conference in Geneva, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was “very concerned about the development of the situation in China”. He asked for specific data on the severity of illness, hospitalizations, and need for intensive care. He added that “vaccination is an exit strategy” in the coronavirus outbreak.
China has developed and manufactured its vaccine, which has been proven to be less effective in protecting people from severe illness and death from the novel coronavirus than mRNA vaccines used in many other countries around the world. there is His comments came as the German government announced Wednesday that it had sent the first batch of the BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine to China. The German vaccine will initially be administered to expatriates in China, estimated at around 20,000. This is the first foreign Covid-19 vaccine to be shipped to China, but no details have been released about the timing or extent of shipments. During a visit to Beijing last month, Prime Minister Olaf Scholz urged that the vaccine be made freely available to the Chinese public.
