Shanghai (China), (EFE).- China spent some 150,000 million yuan (21,532 million dollars, 20,336 million euros) in its vaccination campaign against covid-19 throughout 2021 and 2022, according to data from the National Health Security Administration (NHSA) cited today by the private digital newspaper Caixin.
The agency also indicated today that, in 2022, the national health insurance fund paid some 4,300 million yuan (617 million dollars, 583 million euros) in PCR tests to detect covid, although this item mainly covered tests carried out in hospitals. before authorizing the admission of new patients.
In May of last year, when almost the entire country was routinely undergoing free PCR tests as part of the already dismantled ‘zero covid’ strategy, the NHSA prohibited financing them with money from the national health insurance fund, which could only be used for the aforementioned tests in hospitals.
Caixin estimates the cost of each PCR test at between 3.5 and 16 yuan (between 0.5 and 2.3 dollars, between 0.47 and 2.17 euros), an expense that fell on the budgets of local and regional governments , which raised concern about the state of the finances of these administrations, already weighed down by the drop in economic activity derived from the ‘zero covid’ restrictions and confinements, as well as by other factors such as the real estate crisis.
That same media recently reported that the amount spent on anti-covid measures reached the equivalent of 10.3 billion dollars in 2022 in the southeastern province of Canton, also mentioning what was used in Zhejiang (east, 6.3 billion dollars) or in the capital city of Beijing (4.350 million dollars).
Data from the NHSA show that the national health insurance fund closed 2022 with a balance of about 4.3 trillion yuan (617,284 million dollars, 583,290 million euros) after entering 3 trillion yuan (430,663 million dollars, 409,947 million euros) and spend 2.4 trillion yuan (344,531 million dollars, 325,557 million euros).
