China says tracking COVID-19 cases now 'impossible' amid reduced testing

BEIJING: The true scale of COVID-19 infections in China is now "impossible" to track, the country's top health body said on Wednesday (Dec 14), as officials warned of a rapid spread in Beijing after the country abruptly dropped its zero-tolerance policy.

China last week loosened restrictions for mass testing and quarantine after nearly three years of attempting to stamp out the virus, prompting officially reported infections to fall quickly from the all-time highs recorded last month.

And with testing no longer required for much of the country, China's National Health Commission (NHC) on Wednesday admitted its numbers no longer reflected reality.

"Many asymptomatic people are no longer participating in nucleic acid testing, so it is impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infected people," the NHC said in a statement.

It added that it will stop reporting new asymptomatic infections from Wednesday.

The statement comes after Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said the capital's new infections were "rapidly growing", according to a state media readout.

Chinese leaders are determined to press ahead with opening up, with Beijing's tourism authorities saying on Tuesday that it would resume tour groups in and out of the capital.

But the country is facing a surge in cases it is ill-equipped to manage, with millions of vulnerable elderly still not fully vaccinated and underfunded hospitals lacking the resources to deal with an expected influx of infected patients.

And as the country steers a tricky path out of its zero-COVID policy towards living with the virus, many with symptoms have opted to self-medicate at home.

The NHC reported 2,291 new symptomatic COVID-19 infections on Wednesday, as compared to 7,679 new cases a day earlier – 2,315 symptomatic and 5,364 asymptomatic infections.

Excluding imported infections, China reported 2,249 new symptomatic local cases. There were a total of 7,451 local cases including asymptomatic infections a day earlier.

There were no new deaths, keeping fatalities at 5,235. China has confirmed 369,918 symptomatic cases as of Wednesday.

Residents of Beijing have complained of sold-out cold medicines and long lines at pharmacies, while Chinese search giant Baidu said that searches for fever-reducing Ibuprofen had risen 430 per cent over the past week.

Soaring demand for rapid antigen tests and medications has created a black market with astronomical prices, while buyers resort to sourcing the goods from "dealers" whose contacts are being passed around WeChat groups.

Authorities are cracking down, with market regulators hitting one business in Beijing with a 300,000 yuan (US$43,000) fine for selling overpriced test kits, the local Beijing News reported on Tuesday.

And in a sea change in a country where infection with the virus was once taboo and recovered patients faced discrimination, people are taking to social media to show off their test results and give detailed descriptions of their experiences being sick.

"When my body temperature went past 37.2 degrees, I began to add some sugar and salt to my lemon water," Beijing-based Xiaohongshu social site user "Nina" wrote in one account intended as advice for those not yet infected.

"I've been resurrected!!" wrote another account owner in the caption to a photo showing a row of five positive antigen tests and one negative.

This brave xmm who was the first person to protest with a piece of white paper has gone MIA.....

Chinese cities ease COVID curbs as virus keeps spreading

BEIJING - Some communities in Chinese cities where Covid-19 is still spreading are easing off on testing requirements and quarantine rules ahead of an expected shift in virus policies nationwide after widespread social unrest.

The uneven relaxation of Covid-19 restrictions is, however, fuelling fear among some residents who suddenly feel more exposed to a disease authorities had consistently described as deadly until this week.

Pharmacies in Beijing say purchases of N95 masks, which offer a much higher degree of protection than the single-use surgical type, have gone up this week. Some people wearing N95s on Friday said they got them from their employers.

Such cautious behaviour bodes ill for consumer-facing businesses and factories in large Covid-hit cities whose workers are hoping to stay virus-free at least until they return to their families in the countryside for the Chinese New Year.

The elderly, many of whom are still unvaccinated, feel the most vulnerable.

Shi Wei, a Beijing resident suffering from lymphatic cancer, spends most of his time isolating, but still worries about getting Covid-19 and giving it to his 80-year-old mother as he goes out for hospital treatment every three weeks.

“I can only pray God protects me,” he said.

China’s Covid-19 policies have hammered its economy, choking everything from domestic consumption, to factory output, to global supply chains, and causing severe mental stress for hundreds of millions of people.

Anger over the world’s toughest curbs fuelled dozens of protests in more than 20 cities in recent days in a show of civil disobedience unprecedented in mainland China since President Xi Jinping took power in 2012.

Less than 24 hours after people clashed with white hazmat-suited riot police in Guangzhou, a sprawling manufacturing hub just north of Hong Kong, the city lifted lockdowns in at least seven of its districts. Some communities now require less frequent testing and are allowing close contacts of infected people to quarantine at home, according to state media.

But the uneven easing of rules around the city is causing other kinds of trouble for its residents.

“I am leaving on holiday tomorrow and had to search for a place to get a Covid-19 test because I still need a 48 hour code to get to the airport but most of the testing stations have been removed,” said a diplomat at a foreign consulate in Guangzhou.

Softer tone

Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan, who oversees Covid-19 efforts, said this week the ability of the virus to cause disease was weakening - a message that aligns with what health authorities around the world have said for more than a year.

While government authorities in cities that have lifted lockdowns did not mention the protests in their announcements, national health officials have said China will address the “urgent concerns” expressed by the public.

China is set to announce nationwide easing of quarantine and testing requirements, sources told Reuters, in what many hope would make the implementation more uniform.

The measures include a reduction in the use of mass testing and regular nucleic acid tests as well as moves to allow positive cases and close contacts to isolate at home under certain conditions, the sources familiar with the matter said.

On the ground, however, some communities in Beijing and elsewhere have already allowed close contacts of people carrying the virus to quarantine at home, while some shopping malls in the capital have reopened from Thursday.

More at https://www.reuters.com/world/china/scattered-easing-covid-curbs-across-china-after-week-unrest-2022-12-02/

Awkward silence: China official temporarily speechless after question on protests

Tiong tanks appear in Xuzhou liao.....

Because, logic. Winnie FTW. #censorship #China #zerocovid

#Chinese taking to the streets of #Beijing to protest against the #zerocovid policy. The protestors are holding white/blank paper to protests against #censorship. #China

Chinese Communist Party faces threat not seen since protests that led to Tiananmen Square massacre

China has witnessed bigger protests in Hong Kong, but nothing on the mainland has come close to this since 1989.

Unrest is actually commonplace in China but demonstrations are usually small, localised and easily quashed.

What will worry China's leadership about these protests is their size, their spread across the country, and their persistence.

The authoritarian Chinese Communist Party has not seen a threat like this since the pro-democracy movements of the late 1980s that culminated in the brutal Tiananmen Square massacre.

The spark this time was an apartment fire in the western city of Urumqi that took at least 10 lives.

But these protests have been coming for months.

Seething anger and resentment at the government's zero-COVID policies has been building. There is something more fundamental going on, though.

According to popular wisdom, ever since that infamous massacre at Tiananmen, the Chinese Communist Party and the people have had a deal.

We will make you more prosperous and keep society stable, and you will let us get on with running the country.

Stability and prosperity mean everything to the Chinese because, as they have learned since childhood, theirs has been a history of chaos, poverty and upheaval. The people have trusted their government to make sure that stays in the past.

During lockdown, however, the people have begun to doubt their government and its competence to rule.

Under the zero-COVID policy, people have been locked in their communities for months and they fear the state's heavy handedness is killing people - in this case burned alive, locked in an apartment block in Urumqi.

And making matters worse, under lockdown, the economy has not continued on its ever upward trajectory.

The Chinese know the rest of the world is moving on from COVID while they are not. The sight on their televisions of World Cup crowds in their thousands without masks is proof of that. That compact between state and people is no longer delivering like it used to and it means we are in uncharted waters.

And more unrest is almost certainly on its way.

President Xi Jinping has staked a huge amount on China's zero-COVID policy.

Instead of saving lives by importing more effective vaccines from the outside world - but losing face - his government has tried to eliminate the virus wherever it appears with draconian social controls.

But it has not worked and China is battling outbreaks in a multiplying number of cities. If people continue to protest and defy the lockdowns, the virus will spread.

China is not prepared medically, though.

As Professor Kerry Brown, of King's College London, puts it: "They have to quite quickly put in place emergency measures for the health service to take a kind of spike in numbers that might need to be hospitalised."

Tracking, tracing and locking down may work with a quiescent population, but for an angry citizenry losing trust in the authorities, it does not.

"If you continue with the policies that have been in place at the moment, you're going to get more and more of these protests and they could morph into something far more threatening," Prof Brown added.

What the Chinese government fears most is a nationally organised opposition, knowing it has spelled the doom of dynasties in the past.

When a harmless spiritual movement called Falun Gong went countrywide in the 90s and its followers surrounded Zhongnanhai, the government compound in Beijing, in a peaceful protest, the leadership was terrified and used the most draconian repression to stamp it out.

It has invested billions in an emerging Orwellian surveillance state to anticipate dissent and unrest and prevent it from spreading.

It now faces nationwide unrest erupting spontaneously. It will no doubt use all the resources of its totalitarian state to try to repress it, but faces its biggest challenge in more than three decades as it tries to do so.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/chinese-communist-party-faces-threat-not-seen-since-protests-that-led-to-tiananmen-square-massacre/ar-AA14C8KK

WATCH: Crowds in Guangzhou crashed through barriers and marched down streets on Monday (Nov 14) night in a show of public resentment over COVID-19 curbs.

Chengdu with a population of 21 million is slated to go into lockdown starting tonight!

Shanghai's leader calls tough Covid-19 curbs 'correct'

SHANGHAI (BLOOMBERG) - Shanghai's leader declared victory in defending the financial hub against Covid-19. He said the two-month lockdown was "completely correct".

Shanghai "broke the repeated stalemate of the epidemic, realised and consolidated the fruits of dynamic clearance in society, and won the battle to defend Shanghai," Mr Li Qiang said at the city's Communist Party congress on Saturday (June 25), echoing triumphant claims in state media earlier this month.

Mr Li also gave credit "to the important instructions of General Secretary Xi Jinping".

Shanghai eased more of the rules that have curtailed normal daily activity since late March, announcing plans to let restaurants in some areas deemed lower risk resume dine-in services this week.

The city reported just four local cases for Sunday, with two found outside quarantine.

Shares of liquor stocks advanced Monday after the announcement about eateries in the city of 25 million people, helping the consumer staples subgauge rise 2.3 per cent, among the best performers on the CSI 300 Index.

Tsingtao Brewery Co, Wuliangye Yibin Co and Luzhou Laojiao Co all rose at least 3.8 per cent.

The fate of Mr Li, a 62-year-old who once served as a top aide to the president, is being closely watched ahead of a Communist Party meeting later this year at which Mr Xi’s expected to secure a third term in office.

The question is whether Mr Li will get a seat on the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the ruling party’s most powerful body, possibly even as premier.

All but one Shanghai party secretary has made it to the top body since 1987, with former Premier Zhu Rongji and Mr Xi himself among those to advance.

Should Mr Li fail to make the body, it may be an indication that Mr Xi – the most powerful leader in China in decades – was unable to promote him given his handling of the Shanghai outbreak.

The desperate scenes in Shanghai presented the biggest crisis for China’s Communist Party since the virus emerged in Wuhan, triggering the world’s first lockdown.

Throughout the early days of the pandemic, the financial hub had taken a looser approach to containing Covid, and initially resisted a lockdown when cases flared again earlier this year.

But it soon became clear the outbreak was widespread, necessitating more draconian measures.

Residents weren’t allowed to leave their homes to buy food or seek medical care during much of the two-month lockdown, prompting some of the most high-profile protests in years against China’s government to erupt in housing compounds and social media.

Mr Li himself faced criticism from many in Shanghai for his handling of the lockdown.

In one incident, he was stopped by a woman in a wheelchair during a public visit who scolded the government for failing to provide enough food.

Following Shanghai’s experience, Beijing began to move faster and earlier in other cities locking down individual neighbourhoods and apartment blocks over one or two cases.

The government is also investing more in its testing regime, building permanent PCR testing infrastructure in places like the capital and Shanghai, and making negative results a requirement to enter shopping malls, office buildings and even public parks.

Beijing is also taking more steps toward resuming normal life, with in-person classes for primary and middle schools set to resume on Monday.

Mr Li Yi, a spokesperson for the city’s education commission, said at a press briefing that two months of remote learning were increasingly causing "problems" for students, including psychologically. Beijing reported four local cases Sunday.

The city of Dandong, which borders North Korea, warned of a persistent risk of new Covid-19 flareups as it gradually opens up from a weekslong lockdown. The city reported six asymptomatic cases Sunday.

A local disease control official said there was no clear origin for most of the cases in the current wave, which started May 24.

The official added that Dandong will carry out mass testings for all residents twice a week, according to a post on the city’s official WeChat account.

Authorities in the gaming hub of Macau extended the suspension of public sector activities, except for emergency services, until at least July 1, according to a statement on the city government’s website.

It reported 261 cases in the current outbreak and said a third round of mass testing was planned for Monday and Tuesday.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-26/china-s-dandong-warned-of-risks-for-continuous-covid-flareups

COVID-Hit Shanghai Announces Gradual Reopening of Businesses

Shanghai — Shanghai announced a gradual reopening from Monday of businesses, although it remains unclear when the millions of people still locked down in China's economic capital will finally be allowed out of their homes.

Confronted with its worst COVID-19 outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic, China -- the last major economy still closed off to the world -- put the city of 25 million under heavy restrictions in early April.

The rigid strategy to root out cases at all costs has wreaked havoc on supply chains, crushed small businesses and imperiled the country's economic goals.

For many Shanghai residents, some of whom were already confined to their homes even before April, the frustrations have included problems with food supplies, access to non-COVID medical care and spartan quarantine centers, and many are venting their anger online.

Shanghai Vice Mayor Chen Tong on Sunday announced a reopening of businesses "in stages" from May 16.

Chen, however, did not specify if he was referring to a gradual resumption of activity in the city or if it was conditional on certain health criteria.

Under China's zero-COVID strategy, any lifting of restrictions is generally conditional on seeing no new positive cases for three days, outside of quarantine centers.

Shanghai authorities were aiming for this goal by mid-May.

Infections appear to be on the decline, with 1,369 new cases reported on Sunday in Shanghai, way down from more than 25,000 at the end of April.

In some areas of the city, however, restrictions have been tightened in recent days.

Some 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) north, residents of Beijing fear they could face a similar lockdown after more than a thousand cases were recorded in the capital since the end of April.

Beijing has repeatedly tested its residents and locked down buildings with positive cases and closed metro stations and non-essential businesses in certain neighborhoods.

In an attempt to curb the outbreak, Fangshan district in the southwest of Beijing, which has 1.3 million residents, suspended taxi services from Saturday.

Apart from a few neighborhoods which are under restrictions, the majority of Beijing's 22 million inhabitants can still leave their homes.

But many public places are closed and residents are forced to work from home, especially in the populous Chaoyang district, where many multinationals are based.

https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-hit-shanghai-announces-gradual-reopening-of-businesses/6574372.html

Xi Moves to Silence Covid Zero Critics in Sign of Brewing Tumult

China’s top leaders warned against questioning Xi Jinping’s Covid Zero strategy, striking a more defensive tone as pressure builds to relax virus curbs and protect the economic growth that has long been a source of Communist Party strength.

The Politburo’s supreme seven-member Standing Committee pledged Thursday during a meeting led by Xi to “fight against any speech that distorts, questions or rejects our country’s Covid-control policy,” state broadcaster China Central Television said. The body reaffirmed its support for the lockdown-dependent approach, noting that China has been continuously calibrating measures since the first outbreak two years ago in Wuhan.

“Our pandemic prevention-and-control strategy is determined by the party’s nature and principles,” the seven-member committee said, according to CCTV. “Our policy can stand the test of history, and our measures are scientific and effective.”

The Standing Committee’s comments came after White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci said China’s virus lockdowns were unlikely to be successful in the long term. At home, too, some have begun to question whether the need to contain the virus justified the impact of lockdowns and resulting supply chain disruptions, after the nation’s economic activity contracted sharply in April.

One of the best known defenders of China’s policies, former Global Times Editor-in-Chief Hu Xijin, published and then soon deleted a WeChat post earlier Thursday suggesting that the economic costs of containing the virus shouldn’t exceed the public-health benefits. The national government should “either make low-cost containment work or tell the truth to the entire Chinese society” if the virus situation worsens in the capital, Hu said.

Xi can afford little internal dissent as he prepares for a twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle later this year, when he’s expected to secure a precedent-breaking third term. The statement didn’t mention the need to balance economic growth, which has been a key source of Communist Party legitimacy for more than four decades, suggesting Xi is staking his authority on a Covid policy he’s trumpeted as evidence of how China’s model of governance is superior to Western democracy.

‘Xi Cannot Afford to Lose’

The Standing Committee statement shows Xi is seeking to fend opposition to the policy because nobody can challenge the party’s decisions, said Deng Yuwen, a former editor of a Communist Party newspaper. The Shanghai chaos reinforced Xi’s belief in Covid Zero because a high death toll would be blamed on the party, he added.

“No matter how much disunity from within, they still have to listen to Xi,” Deng said. “Covid prevention has become a fight that Xi cannot afford to lose.”

The rhetoric weighed on mainland stocks Friday, with the benchmark CSI 300 Index finishing the session down 2.5%, outpacing regional losses. Other reasons for the weakness included surging U.S. Treasury yields, the tightening cycle by the Federal Reserve and a selloff on Wall Street overnight.

In recent weeks, Chinese authorities have increasingly credited Xi with personally setting the tone for the nation’s Covid response, making any reversal riskier for the party. The Standing Committee’s statement was featured across the front page of all China’s major state-run newspapers Friday, while an editorial in a publication controlled by the party’s top disciplinary body linked the virus policy to a fundamental directive to safeguard Xi’s status as the party’s “core” leader.

The Standing Committee statement signals there is “doubt about using the Covid Zero strategy to fight omicron in fairly high levels of the party and the government,” said Andy Chen, a senior analyst with Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China.

Beijing posted 72 cases, up from 50 the day before, its 13th double-digit day. While the capital hasn’t been put under the full lockdown seen in recent weeks in Shanghai, restrictions have steadily advanced. Officials banned eating in restaurants, required negative test results to enter almost all public venues and encouraged residents in the eastern Chaoyang district, where the outbreak has concentrated, to work from home.

Meanwhile, Shanghai continues to struggle to achieve its goal of three consecutive days without new cases in the community, reporting 23 such infections Thursday. That’s even as overall cases citywide continue to fall to 4,269, compared with 4,651 a day earlier. Nationwide, China hasn’t reported a day without infections nationally since October.

China’s main strategy to minimize damage to its economy amid the rolling lockdowns is for companies and factories to operate in a “closed loop,” in which workers live and sleep on-site or in nearby accommodation that they’re shuttled to. This has helped Shanghai restart production at more than 70% of its industrial manufacturing facilities, while 90% of 660 “key” industrial companies have resumed output, officials said this week.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-05/china-s-top-leaders-reiterate-support-for-covid-zero-cctv

Youtuber: I fled Shanghai...

IN PHOTOS: The gates of dozens of subway stations in Beijing were shuttered today as China curbed public transport to stop the spread of COVID-19.

Shanghai: Authorities fire four officials after elderly patient blunder

Chinese district authorities have fired four officials after an elderly patient from a Shanghai care home was believed to be dead and loaded into a hearse.

On Sunday, online videos emerged showing two people who appear to be mortuary workers placing the body bag into a vehicle.

The workers are later seen pulling the bag open, and one can be heard saying the patient is still alive.

The incident has sparked widespread anger on Chinese social media.

Officials in the Shanghai district of Putuo confirmed the incident late on Monday, adding that the patient had since been taken to hospital and was in a stable condition.

District authorities said five officials and one doctor were under investigation.

Four officials, including the deputy director of the local civil affairs bureau and the director of the care home, were fired. A doctor identified only by their surname Tian, also had their medical license revoked.

The patient's identity is still unknown.

Many online condemned the incident, with former editor-in-chief of state news outlet Hu Xijing calling it a "serious dereliction of duty that almost led to death".

Another commenter on social media site Weibo said it was a sign of the "chaos" happening in Shanghai.

Shanghai, China's largest city and home to almost 25 million people, is now in its sixth week of restrictions aimed at curbing Covid cases, which began spiking again in March.

Most people are still banned from leaving their homes for any reason - Covid-infected and their close contacts are forced to go to a state-run quarantine centre. Videos have emerged of clashes between police and people being forced out of their homes.

The BBC has previously reported evidence that authorities in Shanghai were struggling to deal with the outbreak.

China is one of the last remaining nations still committed to eradicating Covid, in contrast to most of the world which is trying to live with the virus.

But this zero-Covid policy has come under strain in recent weeks with the spread of the Omicron variant.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-61304033

Shanghai residents buay tahan liao, resorts to clanging pots and pants to protest!

Beijing to test 20 million for COVID as lockdown jitters grow

Residents across Beijing joined growing lines of people waiting to be screened for COVID-19 on Tuesday after the Chinese capital overnight ramped up plans for mass-testing to 20 million people and fuelled worries about a looming lockdown.

Amid comparisons with Shanghai, where more than 1,000 cases were reported in March before widespread curbs were finally imposed on 26 million people, many in Beijing flocked to supermarkets to stock up on food and supplies fearing sudden localised lockdowns.

Authorities on Tuesday started to close some gyms, theatres and tourist sites, the day after Beijing began testing the residents of its most populous district, Chaoyang. By end-Monday, Beijing announced it would conduct tests on 10 other districts and one economic development zone by Saturday.

The Chinese capital reported 33 new locally transmitted cases for April 25, the city's health authority said on Tuesday, of which 32 were symptomatic and one was asymptomatic. That was slightly higher than 19 community infections reported a day earlier.

Beijing's decision to test most of its total population of 22 million days after detecting a small number of infections contrasts with Shanghai, which waited for about a month after its outbreak began before moving to city-wide mass testing in early April.

Three rounds of PCR tests will be conducted from Tuesday to Saturday in districts including Haidian, where Liu Wentao, a cook leaving his dorm to get tested, told Reuters he was concerned at how fast the virus was spreading though confident Beijing could avoid locking down like Shanghai.

"Beijing is the capital, the virus controls are stronger than in other places, I don't think it will be like Shanghai, where it suddenly increases to thousands of cases," Liu said.

While Beijing's latest COVID outbreak is modest by global standards, a Shanghai-style lockdown of the Chinese capital would further cloud the country's economic outlook.

Shanghai's economy slowed in the first quarter, hurt by rare declines in industrial output and local consumption due to the city's COVID outbreak. In March alone, retail sales nosedived by 18.9%.

"Clearly, Shanghai has taught one lesson, which is if you go down this line of total lockdowns, not only is it incredibly expensive, but also it's economically destructive and it stresses out the social fibre," Joerg Wuttke, president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters.

Asian markets suffered their worst day in over a month on Monday on fears that Beijing was about to enter such a lockdown. Chinese shares slumped to a two-year low.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-beijing-expands-covid-19-mass-testing-most-city-2022-04-26/

Riots break out in Shanghai!!!! 成何体统!!!!!