Beijing, EFE.- The Council of Condition (Chinese executive) recommended this Thursday to local authorities the use of traditional Chinese medicine in the treatment of covid for “having played an important role since the start of the pandemic,” government websites reported in recent hours.
The Executive stressed that traditional medicine preparations have an “abundance of raw materials” and great “variety and applicability”, in addition to noting that their processes are “simple”.
The official statement advises that traditional treatments be classified into different categories and applications such as “reduce fever” or “relieve cough” and that the recipes be “concise, effective and adequate.”
The government asks local authorities to combine Chinese and “Western” medicine and to use the medicines “according to their local conditions and available supply.”
The Chinese health authorities, many of whose embassies abroad already distributed traditional preparations among their citizens in 2020, have defended that Chinese medicine has shown effectiveness in reducing the number of serious cases and deaths from covid-19, and have included treatments such as acupuncture in the national protocols for prevention and control.
During outbreaks like the one in Shanghai last spring, millions of boxes of Chinese medicines like Lianhua Qingwen, commonly used to treat cold symptoms, were distributed.
This massive distribution of the medicine, a compound of medicinal herbs based on an ancient recipe and developed during the SARS outbreak in 2003, is criticized by some voices in the country’s medical community, who question the efficacy of traditional Chinese medicine. against covid.
Since China began dismantling its ‘zero covid’ policy at the beginning of December, there has been a wave of infections that has led to shortages of medicines such as ibuprofen in some cities.
Likewise, hospitals in large cities such as Beijing have been subjected to great pressure and have suffered difficulties in caring for all patients, according to testimonies collected on the country’s social networks.
There are doubts about the reliability of the official figures, which have reported only a handful of recent deaths from the disease despite the fact that, for example, the province of Zhejiang (east) recently estimated that one million of its inhabitants were infected every day.
WHO concerned about Covid in China
Last week, the World Health Organization was “very concerned” about the evolution of the covid in China and demanded “more information”, to which Beijing responded that it has shared its data “in an open, timely and transparent manner”. since the start of the pandemic.
The National Health Commission declared this Monday that, as of January 8, the covid will cease to be a category A disease, the level of maximum danger and for whose containment the most severe measures are required, to become a category one. B, which contemplates a more lax control, thus marking the end of the ‘zero covid’ policy that had been in force for almost three years and that in recent weeks the authorities have disarmed
