China braces for COVID surge after lifting controls

BEIJING — At a hospital in the a±uent Beijing district of Chaoyang, close to 100 people lined up outdoors in near freezing weather Friday at a clinic designated for fever patients. Some residents flocked to pharmacies, buying up dwindling stocks of at-home antigen coronavirus test kits and herbal medicines. Many chose to stay home, leaving the capital’s usually busy streets quiet except for the puttering of motorbikes driven by food delivery workers.

Beijing is bracing for a surge in COVID-19 cases, as extensive controls that had kept the virus at bay for nearly three years have been abruptly abandoned this week after China rolled back its strict pandemic policy.

Across the country, officials have been scrambling to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed as more people become infected. At many of Beijing’s hospitals, health workers screen people who show up with fevers to identify those who are seriously ill and send home those with milder symptoms.

Part of the challenge for the ruling Communist Party is that less than 1 percent of people in China have had COVID-19 through November, and so many are vulnerable to infection. The general public has also been told by state media for nearly three years the virus leads to severe illness and death, a justification for the lockdowns and mass quarantines that set off widespread protests last month in a rare challenge to the government.

Health experts and Chinese officials are stepping up efforts to urge residents not to go to hospitals unless necessary. With the help of the government’s propaganda apparatus, they have been assuring residents they have little to fear from the omicron variants currently spreading around the country.

“The infections are not scary,” Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory scientist who is highly regarded in China, said at a conference Friday that was covered by state media.

“Ninety-nine percent of the people who get infected can fully recover within 7 to 10 days,” Zhong said. “As long as we get plenty of rest, isolate ourselves and stay at home, we can recover quickly.”

As the government has moved away from mass testing and contact tracing to focus on ramping up vaccinations and treating those who are severely ill, the scale of China’s outbreaks is increasingly unclear. Nationwide, the number of new cases has fallen to just over 16,000 on Thursday, down from around 40,000 in early December — a decline so unlikely that even a prominent nationalist called the picture “distorted” and questioned the need for the government to continue releasing case counts.

“This problem should be exposed, and the numbers should be returned to their true appearance, or they should not be reported at all,” said Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, on Weibo, a popular social media site. “This is not conducive to maintaining the seriousness of official information nor is it conducive to shaping everyone’s objective understanding of the spread of the epidemic.”

In Beijing, where PCR testing booths have disappeared from many sidewalks, at least 2,600 cases were recorded Thursday, according to the government, but that tally is widely seen as a significant undercount.

A gray-haired woman near the front of the line Friday evening at a fever clinic next to a hospital in the Chaoyang district said she had been standing outdoors in the line for almost five hours. The woman — who only gave her family name, Liu, in discussing her personal health — said she had developed a mild fever on Thursday that lingered Friday.

“I couldn’t find any cold or fever medicine in any pharmacy, so I came here,” she said. “I did not expect I would wait such a long time.”

Despite the government’s reassurances, the abrupt dismantling of three years of bureaucratic machinery to halt the spread of COVID-19 has prompted concern from medical experts outside of mainland China. The experts had been calling instead for China to conduct a six-month vaccination campaign before opening up.