Reuters and Afp
Newspaper La Jornada
Saturday December 24, 2022, p. 8
Peking. China expects a peak in Covid-19 infections within a week, a health official said yesterday, and authorities foresee an additional burden on the country’s healthcare system, even as they are downplaying the severity of the disease and continue to without notifying new deaths.
With the outbreak escalating and widespread protests against his lockdown and testing policy, known as covid zero
China began easing its restrictions earlier this month, becoming the latest major country to come to terms with the virus.
The Chinese government reported 3,761 new symptomatic cases of covid-19 across the country for last Thursday, and no new deaths for the third day in a row. Authorities have restricted the criteria for determining deaths from SARS-CoV-2, drawing criticism from many experts.
Since the restrictions were lifted, the Chinese authorities have only officially reported six deaths from the disease, while an average of 3,000 cases are registered daily.
Zhang Wenhong, director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, said China is expected to reach the peak of infections within a week
reported the medium the paper.
More serious diseases
The infection spike will also increase the rate of serious illness, which will have some impact on all of our medical resources.
agreed the official, adding that the wave will last another month or two after that. We must be aware that infection is inevitable
.
However, Zhang said he had visited nursing homes around Shanghai, noting that the number of elderly people with severe symptoms was low.
About 37 million people may have been infected with covid-19 on a single day this week in China, Bloomberg News reported, citing estimates from the government’s top health authority.
Yuan and stocks fall
Concerns about the short-term impact of the Chinese wave of covid sent the stocks of China, Hong Kong and other Asian countries lower. The yuan also weakened.
According to the British health data company Airfinity, China is likely to experience more than a million infections a day and more than 5,000 deaths a day, which is a stark contrast
with the official data.
A Shanghai hospital estimated that half of the 25 million inhabitants of the huge commercial hub will be infected by the end of next week. Experts consulted by the Reuters agency affirm that China could face more than a million deaths from covid-19 next year.
In Chongqing, a large city in the southwest of the Asian country, some hospitals are overwhelmed by sick patients, the Afp agency found.
The global balance of the pandemic is 6,677,218 deaths and 656,584,363 infections, according to Johns Hopkins University.
