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Xi urges steps to ‘protect’ lives as China battles Covid wave
The Chinese president’s first remarks on the pandemic came on a day when a South China Morning Post (SCMP) report said China will “reopen borders and abandon quarantine” for incoming international passengers
Beijing: President Xi Jinping on Monday called on officials to take steps to “protect lives” in his first public remarks on the ongoing Covid outbreak even as China is set to downgrade virus management.
“At present, Covid-19 prevention and control in China are facing a new situation and new tasks,” Xi said in his directive, Xinhua, the official news agency, reported on Monday.
“We should launch the patriotic health campaign in a more targeted way... fortify a community line of defence for epidemic prevention and control, and effectively protect people’s lives, safety and health,” Xi said.
Xi’s first remarks on the pandemic came as National Health Commission (NHC) announced China that is set to downgrade Class A management of Covid-19 to Class B from January 8 next year.
China will not impose quarantine on personnel and commodities entering the country, and will no longer require quarantine for Covid patients nor classify high-risk areas according to infection after downgrading management, state media reported, quoting the NHC, as the disease has become less virulent and will gradually evolve into a common respiratory infection.
The decision to remove all restrictions was reported earlier in the day by South China Morning Post (SCMP).
“It is the country’s last step in shedding three years of zero-Covid and pivoting to living with the virus,” the Hong Kong-based SCMP said in the report on Monday.
The report said Covid-19 has been managed as a top category A infectious disease since 2020, putting it on par with bubonic plague and cholera.
Sources from provincial health authorities and hospitals in Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangsu told the newspaper that they had been asked by the National Health Commission on Sunday to prepare for the downgrading of the disease to category B management from January 8.
“That category means Covid-19 only requires ‘necessary treatment and measures to curb the spread’,” the report said.
The official nomenclature of the disease will be changed from “novel coronavirus pneumonia” to a “novel coronavirus infection”.
China is into the third week of one of the biggest surges in Covid-19 infections after the government abruptly lifted restrictions including mass testing and centralised quarantine from December 7 in response to protests over its strict curbs.
Since then travel restrictions have been lifted and the requirement to show health kits to enter public spaces withdrawn, resulting in an Omicron-driven wave sweeping across China like a wildfire.
In the absence of reliable data on the number of infections and deaths, studies have estimated that around one million people could die over the next few months in China, many of them from among the unvaccinated elderly.
Cities including Beijing are facing shortages of medicine while emergency medical facilities have remained heavily strained.
In a move to tackle the shortage of medicine, Beijing for the first time will distribute Paxlovid, US company Pfizer’s Covid-19 antiviral drug, to community health service centres in the days ahead, state media reported on Monday.
“After training, the community doctors will give instructions on medicine use to residents infected with Covid-19,” China News Service said in a report Monday.
“We have received the notice from officials, but it is not clear when the drugs will arrive,” an insider from the Zhanlan Lu community health service centre of Beijing’s Xicheng district told the news service.
Paxlovid is one of the two oral medicines for Covid-19 treatment approved in China, the other is Azvudine, developed by China’s Genuine Biotech.
A handful of private hospitals in Beijing, the southern city of Guangzhou, and Shanghai in eastern China were among the first in China to offer Paxlovid earlier this month.
The Pfizer drug is the only foreign medicine available in China to that has been approved by China’s regulator for nationwide use to treat Covid-19 but access has not been easy.
