For three years, China boasted about its zero-Covid policy and then let the coronavirus catch it by surprise. The number of infections and deaths in China has been skyrocketing since December. At the same time, a travel boom is breaking out in the world's most populous country.
The body of an old woman lay in her house in the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai for five days before a hearse was finally able to pick her up. The 80-year-old did not die of Corona at the end of December. Because of the exploding corona numbers, the crematoria cannot keep up with the cremation.
In China, not only the funeral parlors are overwhelmed. Hospital beds and medicines are also in short supply. The people would like to take everything that is in the camps with them, reports a pharmacist on ntv. That's why she only sells a limited number of paracetamol and co.
In many cities in China, the clinics are overflowing. Emergency patients queue up and sometimes have to be treated outside of the hospitals. At a hospital in Chengdu, most who arrive by ambulance need oxygen.
The corridors of the clinics are full of beds. Patients are attached to IV lines and have oxygen masks on. The dead are also lying in the corridors.
One of the most important hospitals in Shanghai is currently treating twice as many patients in the emergency room as before the end of zero-Covid. Around 1,600 people are there every day, reports the deputy head of the clinic, Chen Erzhen, in the "Chinese People's Daily". Four out of five of the emergency patients would have Covid-19.
The health staff in the clinics are overwhelmed. A Beijing hospital is already training volunteers, Zhang-Haodi, director of the rescue center, told ntv. They would then answer emergency calls.
With its zero-Covid policy, China had sealed itself off massively for three years and practically locked its own population in. Some people in remote areas have never been in contact with the coronavirus. Now she gets it too. The corona wave has long since reached the country after the big cities.
The government has not released official figures for a long time. Health authorities report only a few thousand infections daily.
According to internal estimates, 18 percent of the population was infected with Corona in the first three weeks of December - almost 250 million people. According to the British research institute Airfinity, at least one million people are infected every day.
In the metropolis of Shanghai alone, more than two thirds of the inhabitants are said to be infected. Airfinity experts estimate that 9,000 people in China die of Corona every day. Officially, however, the number of deaths is extremely low because only people who died of pneumonia or respiratory failure can be counted among the corona deaths. "70 percent of the population" could be affected, Chen Erzhen is quoted as saying in the "Chinese People's Daily".
"The situation in China is really bad. Everyone is sick. A disaster in almost every city. People are coughing, children, adults. Anything but pleasant," is how one air traveler described the conditions in the People's Republic at the end of December.
The fact that the clinics are so overloaded is also due to the fact that the health system in China works differently than in Germany. There are hardly any medical practices. The first port of call for sick people is often the hospital, Xi Chen, a professor of public health at the Yale School of Public Health in the US, tells ntv. However, these are only better equipped in the larger cities. "In the rest of China, the situation is much more tense. People there are not aware that they should stay at home if they have mild symptoms in order to free up capacity for really serious cases. This can quickly cause the system to collapse."
At the same time, travel providers in China have been experiencing a huge rush since the end of December because the government has lifted the quarantine requirement for travelers. Returnees from abroad no longer have to isolate themselves from January 8th. Chinese state media reports that interest in overseas flights has increased by as much as 850 percent. Trips to Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand or South Korea are popular.
"We are in the process of relaunching international routes and we will also add flights to some existing international destinations," said Lu Wen of China Eastern Airlines.
The Chinese opening is causing fear worldwide. Many countries are tightening their entry requirements to prevent the virus from being imported. Italy, France, Japan, the USA and Great Britain, among others, require travelers from China to have a negative corona test. In Spain, 3G applies: passengers must be vaccinated, tested or recovered. Austria and Belgium want to examine the waste water from flights from China. Germany has not yet introduced any compulsory testing at airports.
China is resisting what it considers to be discriminatory entry rules. They only targeted Chinese travelers, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning criticized. The decision lacks any scientific basis. China will take countermeasures.
The virologist Hendrik Streeck advocates a uniform European path on ntv. "Because the planes not only land in Germany, but there are also domestic flights, i.e. from Switzerland, France, other countries to Germany with Chinese travelers." The virus itself is not the problem. "But we have to know the mutations. And we can only do that together in Europe at the airports," said Streeck.
The risk of mutations is growing because the corona virus is spreading so rapidly in China. But there is hardly any testing and sequencing in the People's Republic. China's health department wants to change that: In the provinces, three hospitals are to collect and analyze samples from infected and dead people every week in order to identify new SARS-CoV-2 variants. But experts fear in the US magazine "Science" that this sample size is too small.
"There is potential for the virus to develop in a completely different direction because the immune systems of the population it encounters have not yet been able to react in this way and have steered the virus in a certain direction," estimates the virologist Martin striker at ntv the situation in China. "I think the likelihood of a variant coming that is significantly more aggressive than Omicron is relatively low."
Because the figures from China are not very reliable, Europe wants to introduce “variant monitoring” at the airports itself, said Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach. So far, no new corona variants from China have appeared in Germany, says Hendrik Streeck in an ntv interview.
China is still a long way from immunity to corona, like in other countries. The zero-Covid policy has so far prevented many contagions in the country. But with the wave of travel for the Chinese New Year at the end of January, the virus will spread even further. Chinese researchers warn that even as far as the provinces in central and western China. According to British experts, the current wave will peak at the end of January, with around 25,000 deaths per day.
