China registered its first two deaths from Covid-19 in more than a year on Saturday, amid a rebound in the pandemic linked to the omicron variant that puts the country’s “covid zero” strategy in trouble.
The National Health Commission notified this Saturday the first two deaths since January 26, 2021, both registered in the northeastern province of Jilin, the most affected by this wave that has caused the confinement of millions in several cities.
With these two deaths, the official balance rises to 4,638 fatalities since China first detected the coronavirus in the central city of Wuhan in December 2019.
Both victims were men, ages 65 and 87, and both had underlying health conditions associated with their advanced age.
Likewise, the health authority reported 4,051 new cases today, down from the 4,365 reported the previous day.
Thanks to a severe “covid zero” strategy, consisting of tight border controls, long quarantines for international arrivals and early lockdowns, China has managed to keep the virus at bay since the end of the first wave.
But the contagious omicron variant is putting this strategy in trouble. The most populous country in the world has gone from reporting less than a hundred cases a day three weeks ago, to a minimum of more than 1,000 cases a day during the last week.
In recent weeks, some official sources have suggested that China will have to start living with covid-19 at some point, as most countries in the world have done.
President Xi Jinping said on Thursday that the country should persist in its “zero covid” strategy to “stop the spread of the epidemic as quickly as possible”, but also called for “minimizing the impact of the epidemic on economic development and Social”.
The country’s economic capital, Shanghai, has decreed online teaching and has launched a massive testing campaign, but has avoided total closure for now.
As a result of this latest uptick, the authorities freed up hospital beds and annulled the provision by which all those positive for covid had to be admitted to a health center.
At the same time, new hospital beds are being created in mainland China for fear the virus could put the health system under strain.
Jilin province, on the border with North Korea, has built eight temporary hospitals and two quarantine centers to deal with the thousands of cases in the last week.
State media showed images of dozens of giant cranes assembling temporary medical facilities in that province, which has only about 23,000 beds for 24 million residents.
