Anger and frustration with zero-covid after the swine flu outbreak: Implications for the Communist Party and the Chinese presidency

Anger and frustration with zero-covid has reached new heights and has led to rare scenes of protest, as local authorities rushed to reestablish restrictions despite a recent announcement of a limited easing of some rules.

Fighting back tears, she shouts abuse at the hazmat-suited workers below in a video that has recently gone viral on social media platform Weibo and which appears to encapsulate the Chinese public’s growing frustration with their government’s uncompromising zero-Covid policy.

Since returning from university in the summer, a woman has been under a bicyle for half a year. They stare back, seemingly unmoved.

While the governments of most Asian economies are abandoning the restrictions that were in place during the swine flu outbreak, China is still adamant about the fight being winnable.

That claim comes even as infections flare and a new strain circulates just days before the country’s most important political event, the Communist Party Congress beginning in Beijing on Sunday at which Xi Jinping is expected to cement his place as the country’s most powerful leader in decades.

Observers across the world are watching to see if there are any signs of the party’s priorities in light of its zero- Covid stance, which is blamed for causing mounting problems in the economy.

The Chinatown Zero-Covid-19 protest: No hunger, no democracy, no hunger, nonequality, no freedom, no revolution despite the security surrounding the Chinese Congress

Nerves are high in China’s capital, where online photos posted Thursday appeared to show an exceptionally rare public protest against Xi. No to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to liars and yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. Don’t be a slave, be a citizen,” read one banner hung over an overpass despite the heightened security surrounding the Congress.

The site of the protest was immediately hidden from search results by Weibo. Before long, key words including “Beijing,” “Haidian,” “warrior,” “brave man,” and even “courage” were restricted from search.

A number of accounts have been banned from popular Chinese social network Weibo, after they commented on the protest.

Many spoke of their support and awe. Some shared the Chinese pop hitLonely Warrior in a way that was veiled reference to the protester, who others called a hero, while others posted under the #: “I saw it.”

Even in the face of public discontent, all of the signs suggest the zero-covid approach will persist, with the state media articles this week making it less likely the country will change tack after Congress.

In Shanghai, where 25 million people have already endured two months of the world’s strictest lockdown, residents are now on edge at any signs of a repeat as authorities begin to tighten measures once again.

China’s Health Commission on Thursday reported 1,476 locally transmitted Covid-19 cases nationwide, a significant number in a country where even one infection can trigger a city-wide lockdown.

Spooked by the possibility of unpredictable and unannounced snap lockdowns – and mindful that authorities have previously backtracked after suggesting that no such measures were coming – some people in the city have reportedly been hoarding drinking water.

That panic buying has been made worse by an announcement that Shanghai’s water authorities have taken action to ensure water quality after discovering saltwater inflows to two reservoirs at the mouth of the Yangtze River in September.

Exactly what is driving the increase in infections is not clear, though authorities are scrambling to contain the spread of the BF.7 coronavirus strain after it was first detected in China in late September in Hohhot, the capital city of Inner Mongolia.

The country has also seen an uptick in cases in domestic tourist destinations, despite its strict curbs having discouraged people from traveling or spending over China’s Golden Week holiday in early October.

More than 240,000 students have been locked down on campuses because of the latest outbreak, according to an official from the Department of Education. And the outbreak on campus has led to punitive action, with one university Communist Party boss being sacked after 39 students from his institution tested positive.

There are some 22 million people in the far western part of Xinjiang who are not allowed to leave and are required to stay. Xinjiang recorded 403 new cases on Thursday, according to an official tally.

Beijing’s stance appears unwilling to budge from hardline stance. For three days this week, the state-run Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily published commentaries reiterating that China would not let its guard down.

The battle against Covid was winnable, it insisted. Other countries that had reopened and eased restrictions had done so because they had no choice, it said, as they had failed to “effectively control the epidemic in a timely manner.”

China’s rise and decline: the auto dealer lost his father after the snap Covid restrictions became public in a video chat on November 1, 2011, when his apartment building was locked down

This story was included in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-week update on the country’s rise and how it affects the world. Sign up here.

Zhou, an auto dealer in northeastern China, last saw his father in a video chat in the afternoon of November 1, hours after their home was locked down.

At the time, they didn’t even realize the snap Covid restrictions had been imposed – there was no warning beforehand, and the apartment building where Zhou’s parents and his 10-year-old son lived did not have any cases, he said.

Zhou told CNN in Beijing that his father was killed by the local government. He received no explanation about why it took so long for the ambulance to get to him.

On the same day Zhou lost his father, a 3-year-old boy died of gas poisoning in a locked-down compound in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, after he was blocked from being taken promptly to a hospital. A little girl died in a hotel in Zhengzhou after a 12 hour delay in medical care.

Zhou said he tried to report on his story to the state media, but no reporters showed up. Amid growing desperation and anger, he turned to foreign media – despite knowing the risk of repercussions from the government. CNN is using his name in a way that mitigates the risk.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/25/china/china-zero-covid-discontent-reopening-mic-intl-hnk/index.html

A protest against zero-Covid in Zhengzhou, the capital of China, after a lockdown on July 3: A protest drew attention to Beijing

In the central city of Zhengzhou this week, workers at the world’s biggest iPhone assembly factory clashed with hazmat-suited security officers over a delay in bonus payment and chaotic Covid rules.

In the southwestern city of Chongqing on Thursday, a resident delivered a speech questioning the Covid lock down on his residential compound. “Without freedom, I would rather die!” He shouted to a cheering crowd, who praised him as a hero, and wrestled him away from several police officers who were attempting to take him away.

The defiance displayed by these acts of defiance echoed an online uproar from Chinese football fans, who have only been allowed to watch games from home because they are under some form of restrictions.

Fans are not required to wear face masks, or submit proof of test results. Is there a difference between us and them living on the same planet? asked a Wechat article questioning China’s insistence on zero-Covid, which went viral before it was censored.

Chinese officials have felt the heat of the public discontent which came on top of heavy social and economic tolls caused by the widening lockdowns.

Instead of relaxing controls, many local officials are reverting to the zero-tolerance playbook, attempting to stamp out infections as soon as they flare up.

Shijiazhuang, a city in the northern part of the country, was the first to cancel mass testing. After many online classes, students were allowed to return to school. But as cases rose over the weekend, authorities reimposed a lockdown on Monday, telling residents to stay home.

On Tuesday, financial hub Shanghai banned anyone arriving in the city from entering venues including shopping malls, restaurants, supermarkets and gyms for five days. Half of the city has cultural and entertainment venues shut down.

Baiyun district was locked down for the fifth time this week, after the protest took place in its most populous district.

In Beijing, streets in its largest district of Chaoyang are largely empty as authorities urged residents to stay home and ordered businesses to shut. Schools in several districts moved to online classes.

An update on zero-carbon measures to protect against Covid-like diseases: China’s Lunar New Year proposal for the elderly and other most at risk

Zhong, in the state media interview, said the government’s top priority now should be booster shots, particularly for the elderly and others most at risk, especially with China’s Lunar New Year coming up next month – a peak travel time where urban residents visit elderly relatives and return to rural hometowns.

The Chinese government issued new guidelines on Wednesday that were meant to ease their strict zero-carbon policies. Testing requirements and travel restrictions have been relaxed, and people infected with SARS-CoV-2 who have mild or no symptoms are for the first time allowed to isolate at home instead of in centrally managed facilities. But researchers worry the changes will lead to a rise in infections that risk overwhelming hospitals.

The Chinese government denied that the 20 measures listed in the guidelines were supposed to be a pivot to living with the virus.

The measures are tooptimize existing Covid prevention and control policy according to a disease control official. “They are not an easing (of control), let alone reopening or ‘lying flat’,” he said.

Zhou said that the zero- Covid policy had been too restrictive and beneficial to the majority.

“I don’t want things like this to happen again in China and anywhere in the world,” he said. I have lost my father. My son lost his beloved grandfather. I am angry now.

Implications of the new influenza-like disease curfews on health and public health: What do they mean, and how will they be enforced?

Protests in a number of cities against the strict curfews have led to the announcement. Those led some cities to loosen some restrictions on testing and movement, but the new guidelines go further.

Some of the new rules are ambiguous and open to interpretation by the local governments, for example, when and where to test people during an outbreak and what constitutes high-risk areas.

Furthermore, the guidelines do not lift testing and quarantine requirements for international travellers, which “doesn’t have a rationale if the objective is no longer zero COVID”, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.

It will be hard to limit transmission in high rise buildings where many people live. Allowing people to stymie viral spread will contribute to it, according to George Liu, a public health researcher. Hospitals could be overwhelmed by this.

The timing of the reopening is not ideal, say researchers. Hospitals will see a rise in the number of patients during the winter because it’s Influenza peak season. Many people will be travelling during the month of February to attend next month’s lunar New year and spring festival, increasing the spread of infectious diseases, says Xi Chen, an economist at Yale University.

The number of patients visiting fever clinics was 16 times greater on Sunday than a week prior. In China, where there isn’t a strong primary care system, visiting the hospital is common for minor illness.

Joy Zhang, a sociologist at the University of Kent in UK says that the easing of restrictions doesn’t help businesses recover from long periods of lock down and COVID-19 stigma. I fear that the health and socio- economic risk will be passed on to individuals.

Urgent guidance is needed on how to curb transmission during a surge, such as through mask mandates, work-from-home policies and temporary school closures, says Cowling. He says it is not clear how officials will keep track of whether cities are approaching, or have passed the peak of an infectious disease wave.

The guidelines propose setting up mobile clinics, and training medical staff to address people’s safety concerns to boost vaccination. But they stop short of issuing vaccine mandates or introducing strong incentives for local governments to increase their vaccination rates, says Huang. It is not yet certain whether a rise in infections will lead to a spike in deaths. He says that the full impact is still to be figured out.

Flu surged in the United States after Thanksgiving, bringing the most severe week yet in a season that hit the county extra early. There were more than three-quarters of all the flu hospitalizations and deaths reported in the past week.

All but seven states are experiencing “high” or “very high” respiratory virus activity, according to the CDC. States with moderate, low, or minimal activity are Alaska, Hawaii, Michigan, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia.

Data from Walgreens that tracks prescriptions for Tamiflu and other flu treatments suggests that flu hotspots spread from El Paso to southwest Virginia.

Nancy Foster, vice president for patient safety with the American Hospital Association, said in a statement on Friday that the flu influx is one of the reasons why hospitals are filling up.

In addition, shortages of workers have made it more challenging for hospitals and made it harder for them to care for patients in the post acute care setting. Patients are spending more time in hospitals, waiting for discharge to the next level of care, and limiting our ability to make a bed available for a patient who truly needs to be hospitalized.

Emergence of the Zero-Covid Epidemic: How Well Will Beijing’s Health System Handle a Massive Pandemic?

Changes continued Monday as authorities announced a deactivation of the “mobile itinerary card” health tracking function planned for the following day.

The system that is separate from the health code scanning system that is required in a reduced number of places in China used cell phone data to track travel histories over the course of 14 days in order to identify people who were in a city with a high designation.

But as the scrapping of parts of the zero-Covid infrastructure come apace, there are questions about how the country’s health system will handle a mass outbreak.

Media outlet China Youth Daily documented hours-long lines at a clinic in central Beijing on Friday, and cited unnamed experts calling for residents not to visit hospitals unless necessary.

Health workers in the capital were also grappling with a surge in emergency calls, including from many Covid-positive residents with mild or no symptoms, with a hospital official on Saturday appealing to residents in such cases not to call the city’s 911-like emergency services line and tie up resources needed by the seriously ill.

The daily volume of emergency calls had surged from its usual 5,000 to more than 30,000 in recent days, Chen Zhi, chief physician of the Beijing Emergency Center said, according to official media.

The University of Hong Kong’s chair professor of epidemiology said that the current Omicron strains would spread faster in China than anywhere else because other parts of the world have immunity against earlier Omicron strains.

“No matter how strong the prevention and control is, it will be difficult to completely cut off the transmission chain,” Zhong, who has been a key public voice since the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020, was quoted saying by Xinhua.

The rapid rollback of testing nationwide and the shift by many people to use antigen tests at home has also made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread, with official data now appearing meaningless.

Last Wednesday, top health officials made a sweeping rollback of the mass testing, centralized quarantine, and health code tracking rules that it had relied on to control viral spread. Some aspects of those measures, such as health code use in designated places and central quarantine of severe cases, as well as home isolation of cases, remain.

China’s Covid-19 problem confronts global protests in a country with a surge of Omicron and other forms of the disease

Outside experts warn that China may be unprepared to handle a surge of cases after the sudden lifting of policies in the wake of nationwide protests.

While Omicron may cause relatively milder disease compared to earlier variants, even a small number of serious cases could have a significant impact on the health system in a country of 1.4 billion.

Measures to be undertaken include increasing ICU wards and beds, enhancing medical staff for intensive care and setting up more clinics for fevers, China’s National Health Commission said in a statement.

The experts warned of a lack of experience with the virus, and a shift in tone which could push those who are not critical in need to seek medical care.

Bob Li, a graduate student in Beijing, who tested positive for the virus on Friday said he wasn’t afraid of the virus, but his mother, who lives in the countryside, stayed up all night worrying about him. Li said, ‘She finds the virus very scary.’

The market watchdog in China said on Friday that there was a temporary shortage of certain “hot-selling” drugs, and promised to crack down on price gouging after sales of certain drugs surged 18 times.

A doctor in Beijing stated in a state media interview that people who did not have symptoms of Covid-19 but had positive tests could not be treated with medication.

“People with asymptomatic inflections do not need medication at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition The chief infectious diseases physician at Beijing You An Hospital said in an interview that has been viewed over three hundred million times since Friday.

A moment of pure disbelief for a city with an epidemic: When Covid-19 was discovered in a quarantine facility in Guangzhou, China

Editor’s Note: Lars Hamer is the Editor-in-Chief of the China lifestyle magazine, That’s. He has lived in Guangzhou, China since 2018. His views are his own in this commentary. He’s on a social networking site called “Lars Hammer1”. CNN has opinions on it.

It’s the knock every resident here dreads. Early Tuesday morning, a sudden loud banging at the door of my apartment in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Health care workers ordered everyone to leave the house and wore hazmat suits after a neighbor tested positive for Covid-19.

I had good reason to worry. Just one month ago, a teacher friend of mine and his colleagues were sent to centralized quarantine after one student at his school tested positive for Covid-19. I feared the same was about to happen to me.

Nothing of the sort was what I was surprised by. I took a Covid-19 test, but didn’t do very well. Before my result even came out, I was free to leave my house and go about my day, totally unrestricted.

If this had occurred just weeks before, I would have, like my friend, been labeled a “close contact” and therefore would have been powerless to avoid the quarantine facility’s vice-like grip.

Over the next few days, the Guangzhou I came to in 2018 was almost back to normal. People were in the streets. Friends and families who had not seen each other for months gathered in bars and restaurants, and QR codes were being ripped down from walls; our movements no longer tracked.

There is a new measure forbidding the blocking of fire exits if there is a lock down, for example. Now, people who are infected can isolate themselves at home. Quarantine facilities will soon be obsolete.

Friends and families who had not seen each other for months gathered in bars and restaurants, and QR codes were being ripped down from walls; our movements no longer tracked.

It was the only thing that could be done so I spent most of my time working until late at night. I too began to feel the strain and started considering leaving the country.

It was a moment of pure disbelief. Guangzhou had almost 8,000 cases that day, numbers similar to those that triggered a city-wide lockdown in Shanghai in April.

China’s National Health Commission reduced the number of daily COVID-19 reports from Wednesday in response to a sharp decline in the number of PCR testing after daily cases hit record highs.

A notice on the commission’s website said it stopped publishing daily figures on numbers of COVID-19 cases where no symptoms are detected since it was “impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infected persons,” which have generally accounted for the vast majority of new infections. The only numbers they’re reporting are confirmed cases detected in public testing facilities.

Beijing’s streets have grown eerily quiet, with lines forming at fever clinics, and at pharmacy where cold and flu medications are harder to find.

A group of people were waiting for the results of their nucleic acid test at a Beijing hospital. Nurses in full-body white protective gear checked in patients one by one.

A few kilometers (miles) south, at Chaoyang Hospital, about a dozen people waited in a line of blue tents, deflecting winds amid subzero temperatures. A person in the queue sprayed an object around her as they waited.

A group of people are waiting in line at the pharmacy to get cough medication and Chinese herbal remedies. There’s a sign in front of the store that says to avoid panic and hoarding, we are doing everything we can to fulfill your needs. A man went out and bought two packages of a Chinese remedy, saying each customer was limited from buying more than that.

The city of Beijing has been plagued by the COVID-19 epidemic since the Xi government took office. A spokesperson told the New China Daily News

Questions have been raised regarding whether the Communist Party sought to minimize deaths and cases in China, as the government’s figures have not been independently verified.

Since Tuesday, the U.S. consulates in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang and the central city of Wuhan have been offering only emergency services “in response to increased number of COVID-19 cases,” the State Department said.

Hospitals have also reportedly been struggling to remain staffed, while packages were piling up at distribution points because of a shortage of China’s ubiquitous motorized tricycle delivery drivers.

A number of Chinese universities are allowing students to finish the semester at home in order to reduce the chances of a bigger outbreak during the January travel rush.

The government’s announcement a week ago that it was ending some of the strictest measures follows three years during which it instituted some of the world’s strictest virus restrictions.

Over the last month there have been protests in Beijing and other cities where people want President Xi and the Communist Party to step down. The party responded with a massive show of force and an unknown number of people were arrested at the protests or in the days following.

The impact of the outbreak in the city was visible in the upmarket shopping district Sanlitun on Tuesday. There, the usually bustling shops and restaurants were without customers and, in some cases, functioning on skeleton crews or offering takeout only.

Offices, shops, and residential communities in Beijing are reporting being understaffed or shifted out of work because of employees getting sick with the virus. Some people stay at home to avoid being infectious.

One community worker told CNN that 21 of the 24 workers on her Beijing neighborhood committee office, tasked with coordinating residential matters and activities, had fallen ill in recent days.

Sylvia Sun said that there was not much work being given to them since their superiors were mostly afflicted with the disease. “(The usual) events, lectures, performances, parent-child activities will definitely not be held.”

“It is impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infections,” the NHC said in a notice, citing reduced levels of official testing.

In a Twitter post, Beijing-based lawyer and former American Chamber of Commerce in China chairman James Zimmerman said about 90% of people in his office had Covid, up from around half a few days ago.

A health official said the number of hospital patients with the flu more than doubled during the week that ended December 11.

So far, however, there were only 50 severe and critical cases in hospitals, most of whom had underlying health conditions, Sun Chunlan, China’s top official in charge of managing Covid, said during an inspection of Beijing’s epidemic response on Tuesday.

“At present, the number of newly infected people in Beijing is increasing rapidly, but most of them are asymptomatic and mild cases,” said Sun, who also called for more fever clinics to be set up and made assurances that supply of medicines – which have been hit by a surge in purchases in recent days – was being increased.

The doctor warned hospitals to do all they can to avoid health workers getting infectious quicker in the communities they serve. Such a situation could result in a shortage of medical staff and infections among patients, he said, according to local media reports.

Concerns about scarcity and access to medicines and care have been palpable in public discussion, including on social media. There, a Beijing reporter’s account of her time in a temporary hospital for Covid-19 treatment triggered a firestorm on social media, with a related hashtag getting more than 93 million views on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo since Monday.

Social media users questioned why the reporter was given treatment while others struggled in the video interview, which was posted by Beijing Radio and Television Station on Sunday.

Awesome! A young reporter gets a space in a temporary hospital and takes liquid Ibuprofen for children that is hard-to-find for parents in Beijing,” read one sarcastic comment, which got thousands of likes.

Covid and the canned peaches: warnings from Chinese state media after rumours “the preserved fruit is not a cure nor a substitute for medicine”

Amid fears of the virus, residents have rushed to buy canned peaches, following rumors the vitamin C-loaded snack could prevent or treat Covid. Chinese state media has since warned people the preserved fruit is not a Covid remedy nor a substitute for medicine.