BEIJING The Chinese authorities have stopped publishing the number of infections, but in Beijing you can see the severity of the corona pandemic with your own eyes.
I recently visited the emergency room of a large hospital in Beijing. The lobby was full of elderly people stretched out on stretchers with oxygen masks on their faces. More and more exhausted people came in with tired steps, coughing behind their masks.
Nurses rush through the crowd. In Beijing, even nurses with corona have been asked to work because there is a shortage of staff.
Outside, a middle-aged woman was taking a taxi to go to another hospital, because she would have had to wait in line with hundreds of people for at least four hours.
Corona has been raging in Beijing for almost three weeks now. The exact number of sick people in the city of twenty million inhabitants is not known, but almost all the people I know and talked to on the street had become sick in the last few weeks.
I got infected myself as soon as the restrictions were lifted. I have not heard that anywhere else the coronavirus has spread at a similar rate.
Currently, hospitals are full severely symptomatic. They are especially the elderly. Only two out of three of those over sixty have received three vaccines, only 40 percent of those over 80.
Many have left the vaccination because they were afraid it would cause diseases.
China is now the center of the world’s corona pandemic, as it was at the beginning of 2020, when even basic healthy people died of the disease caused by the corona virus in the city of Wuhan.
According to the Chinese authorities, Corona is now a mild disease, and only a few people die from it every day. Only those who die of pneumonia or respiratory symptoms are counted as victims.
It can be seen in the morgues another kind of truth. Pictures of hearses and hearses jammed in front of them have spread around the world.
I saw the crematorium myself, with numerous relatives in the yard. Police cars circled in front of the crematorium. The police quickly drove ‘s filming team away from the scene.
Before that, we had time to chat with a local man in front of the souvenir shops next to the crematorium. He said that cremations are carried out like an assembly line. There have been many more of them than usual in recent weeks, and a large number of the deceased have been elderly. There is no time for ceremonies.
You now have to wait up to three weeks for cremation. The man said that even corruption-monitoring authorities have been brought to the scene to make sure that the cremation of a relative cannot be speeded up with bribes.
China is believed to be eclipsed infection rates. The British research institute Airfinity, which collects infectious disease data, estimates that 9,000 people are now dying in China every day from the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The virus is tearing through a large country and still finding new targets in the population, most of whom have no immune protection. The majority have not fallen ill with the corona because of China’s steep restrictions.
The situation is made worse by the fact that the Chinese New Year is coming at the end of January. It is China’s busiest travel season.
Many have not visited their home region in three years. Up to hundreds of millions of Chinese are expected to travel from the cities to the countryside.
China’s three-year corona bubble breaks out after the eighth day of January. You can enter the country without a week-long quarantine, where immigrants were locked in a hotel room alone like prisoners.
At the same time, many countries fear the spread of new virus variants from China to the world. China criticizes the concerns as discrimination and political slander. In public, the country’s leadership is still patting itself on the back for managing the pandemic.
However, China is not prepared to handle the explosive growth of infections.
Resources and money have been used for daily testing of millions of people on street corners and strict quarantine of the population. There has been no campaigning for vaccines. The difficult situation of hospitals shows that their resources have not been increased enough. In December, there was a shortage of antipyretics in pharmacies.
The Chinese vent their emotions with the “crying wall” created on social media.
People gather to remember three years of torment doctor of Li Wenliang to the Weibo account. Li was the first doctor to publicly warn about the coronavirus when it was detected in Wuhan in January 2020. Li was silenced by the authorities, and he died soon after as a victim of the coronavirus.
Over the course of three years, at least one million comments have accumulated under Li’s last social media update.
– 2022 was a super bad year for me. I didn’t save any money at all. I lost my job and learned nothing new. I really hope 2023 will be a new beginning, wrote one Weibo user recently.
Another writes that removing restrictions suddenly is crazy. A third complains that intensive care units are full and morgues are overcrowded.
Many assure that Li and the three-year restrictions will not be forgotten.
– Doctor Li, you will still be remembered ten thousand years from now.