Packed ICUs, crowded crematoriums: COVID roils Chinese towns

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

By DAKE KANG today

BAZHOU, China (AP) — Yao Ruyan paced frantically outside the fever clinic of a county hospital in China’s industrial Hebei province, 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of Beijing. Her mother-in-law had COVID-19 and needed urgent medical care, but all hospitals nearby were full.

“They say there’s no beds here,” she barked into her phone.

As China grapples with its first-ever national COVID-19 wave, emergency wards in small cities and towns southwest of Beijing are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds, and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors for a lack of beds.

Yao’s elderly mother-in-law had fallen ill a week ago with the coronavirus. They went first to a local hospital, where lung scans showed signs of pneumonia. But the hospital couldn’t handle COVID-19 cases, Yao was told. She was told to go to larger hospitals in adjacent counties.



Read more: https://apnews.com/article/health-china-beijing-covid-d0718b53ded7fb1a70c2db8e564ed072?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=TopNews&utm_campaign=position_05

[IronLionZion]

1. With so many infected people, we're bound to see new variants we don't know about

So we can see far reaching consequences beyond the immediate impact to their elderly folks dying. Considering how much of the world interacts with China, this can easily spread globally again like the original COVID strain.

Disappointing since Chinese have been good about masking before but I guess there's only so much they can do in crowded cities without good vaccines.

[erronis]

2. I'm afraid you are right. While they were isolating the virus didn't have much chance to mutate.

Now that huge crowds of infected people are milling around, either in the streets, markets, or unfortunately in the hospitals; the virus can try many variants, one or more which may be more successful.

[Lucky Luciano]

3. They refused to allow Western vaccines to their detriment. Even made people fear them.

[myohmy2]

12. maybe...

...they didn't want to admit their science and tech wasn't good enough...or maybe they were waiting as they pushed their science and tech forward...

...as people died of COVID even with Western vaccines some would begin to say the West was poisoning them with bad vaccines...

...if we had a unified national COVID response wouldn't we have been in a similar situation?...should we be thanking our anti-maskers and anti-vacc'ers for resisting?

...this COVID virus seems to be a damned if you do, damned if you don't killer...

...

[Lucky Luciano]

14. It was definitely Chinese nationalism that made them reject western vaccines.

Also, the data quite clearly shows the unvaccinated and unboosted have a much higher case fatality rate.

The Chinese, like the New Zealanders were very well positioned to get off zero Covid with western vaccines. NZ did it right. China didn’t.

[LisaL]

18. New Zealand is a much smaller country.

Much more isolated as well. And even there covid cases are going up.

[Lucky Luciano]

19. Right, but they made a huge vaccine push before exiting zero Covid.

[Warpy]

8. Steady on

They were isolated a little more than we were, but they still needed workers to keep the lights on, the water flowing, and food delivered. The virus has been out there and circulating, just like it was here. We didn't end lockdowns until the vaccine was out and enough people had gotten it. Since then our variants have been variants of a variant instead of the new strain that seemed to pop up every month before the vaccine.

Unfortunately, China's vaccine had only very limited effectiveness and Xi had a bug up his ass about accepting offers of vaccine from the west. He couldn't keep his entire population on house arrest forever, they were already starting to push back, so the result is all too predictable and there is nothing he can do to stop it. It will be horrific for the Chinese and Xi will find himself living in interesting political times because of his incompetence.

Supply chain problems originating in China are going to become not just bad, but extreme.

Now, regarding viral mutation. Please note that from the initial, deadly virus, mutations have become less deadly. This virus is a rapid mutating virus, unlike a lot of more stable viruses, and some virologists are wondering if it will join the other 5 coronaviruses known to infect people and cause a nasty cold and nothing worse. It will take some time to get there, decades at least, and possibly a century or three. Vaccination is our best hope until it happens, new boosters coming out for significant strains and/or variants.

[sybylla]

21. Do you have a link for the "less deadly" evidence?

I am not trying to be critical. I would honestly like to see some evidence that things are getting better.

I follow several medical people on social media - mostly epidemiologists - and they are saying it definitely is not getting less virulent. In fact, the COVID variants hitting China now are pretty brutal. In fact, the variants hitting China are moving faster than any previous variants as epidemiologists share their estimated R calculations (the rate of transmission). It appears in China it may be down to hours.

Link to tweet

And while the number of deaths has many factors, including a weak vaccine and a dictatorial leader who won't admit that fact, there is a crazy number of people getting sick and dying.

Link to tweet

- with charts in the first two replies showing the Chinese vaccine efficacy.

Link to tweet

- because of vaccine hesitation, 40 million in China have not been vaccinated.

Link to tweet

- China's nasal vaccine is more effective, but the time to roll that out would have been before relaxing COVID restrictions.

Link to tweet

- China has relaxed restrictions, but it is not doing a western "let it rip" no-restrictions policy. And they are still seeing millions infected.

[Warpy]

22. Every single strain has been met with "less deadly" and "more deadly" stories

in pop articles but the first strain killed about 4%. Strains now are killing fewer than 1%, even among the unvaccinated. While some of that is most likely due to better treatment methods, like high dose O2 instead of immediate intubation that did more harm than good, plus some of the monoclonal antibody drugs and a couple of new antivirals, the truth is that hospitalizations and deaths are down, even among unvaccinated people.

So, no, I'm not going to post a flurry of links to be met by a flurry of opposing links. I especially don't bother with Twitter.

The last deadly spike was with the delta strain. The omicron strain has been less deadly across the board, even as it has become more infectious. Usually when that happens, a virus has moved its optimum site from the lower respiratory tract to the upper respiratory tract, and omicron is characterized by more sniffles and sneezes, while the original Wuhan virus went right into pneumonia, with scarcely a howdy at the nose and throat.

Here is one link on the gradual mutation into less virulent but more infectious strains, especially in omicron: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04462-1

And as an aside, Facebook and Twitter are lousy places to get medical information, no matter who is posting it. They're rumor mills. People need to stick to peer reviewed, published research and articles taken from it by reputable publications. It will help people stop scaring themselves to death.

[Elessar Zappa]

24. Eric Feigl Ding is a hair on fire nutjob.

It’s very hard to take him seriously.

[madville]

4. This was inevitable

They kept it in check for awhile but everyone should have known sooner or later they’d have to let it burn through the population like it has in most other places.

[Javaman]

5. you know that Xi and his room full of toadies got western vaccines.

they give zero fucks. just a way for them to decrease surplus population

[iluvtennis]

6. This is so sad for humanity. I pray they get the outburst under control. n/t

[Initech]

7. Zero COVID is a complete failure.

Fuck Xi.

[LisaL]

15. Non-zero covid wasn't exactly a success either.

NT

[roamer65]

9. Estimates are that 1.1 billion will be infected in China.

So much for “zero CoVID”.



People in China wanted an end to the program and now they have the results of ending it.

Be careful what you ask for in life, you just may get it.

[LisaL]

16. It was impossible to control covid with lockdowns because of new highly

infectious variants.

[SunSeeker]

10. Xi Jinping is basically murdering his country's elderly.

He opened up the country without vaccinating the most vulnerable.

[NickB79]

11. A lot of that is because of the elderly themselves

There's a huge number of people in China who are against getting the vaccine, especially the elderly.

I'm shocked that a country like China didn't make vaccination mandatory.

https://www.ft.com/content/71db1fcf-94c3-45a5-b86c-cd739758280c

[SunSeeker]

13. Your link has a paywall. Regardless, Xi did nothing to convince the "Refuseniks."

Plus, his vaccines sucked. They were at best 60% effective, unlike our vaccines, and it's unclear if they were ever updated for Omicron like ours were. If he really wanted these folks vaccinated, he would have imported our mRNA vaccines, and then encouraged people to get vaccinated by announcing how effective they were, and making them readily available for free in every neighborhood. Instead, he basically just wrote off China’s elderly.

[LisaL]

17. Less than 15% of eligible persons in US got the bivalent booster.

Don't think for a second we won't be paying the price. We have up to 400 people dying from covid each day. We aren't exactly a success story ourselves.

[SunSeeker]

23. The bivalent booster is readily available everywhere in the US. It's not available in China.

Sadly we are awash in anti-vax propaganda, and it is causing excess deaths, especially in red states that eat up those lies. But I see ads on TV encouraging people to get their bivalent booster, and you can get it free at any CVS, Walgreens, etc., so Biden has definitely made it easy to get vaxxed. That is not the case in China.

[NullTuples]

20. Every time there's been a surge somewhere in the world, a new worse variant emerged.

The chances of mutations rises with more cases; a large number of cases in a short amount of time means more mutations. Over the past three years after it had become established, when the COVID virus inundated an area to the point of health care needing to be triaged, new variants arose and each time it happened the chance of a new, more dangerous-to-everyone variant was the result. And in populations that are only partially vaccinated, that means the chances of a variant that eludes vaccines goes up, too. We - the wealthy nations - should've vaccinated everyone on the planet who could physically tolerate it when we had the chance.