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Covid-19 in China: up to 70 per cent of Shanghai’s population has now been infected, says leading city doctor
- Chen Erzhen, a member of the city’s expert advisory panel, says millions more have been infected compared with last year’s outbreak
- The country’s lifting of Covid controls has seen a surge in cases around the country, with one province saying it is seeing around a million new cases a day
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Seventy per cent of the population in Shanghai may have already been infected with Covid-19 after China’s sudden U-turn on zero-Covid last month, according to a leading doctor in the city.
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Chen Erzhen, vice president at Ruijin Hospital and member of Shanghai’s Covid-19 expert advisory panel, told the party mouthpiece People’s Daily that the situation had changed significantly compared with the city’s prolonged lockdown last spring, when more than 600,000 were infected and nearly 600 died in a city with a population of around 25 million.
“At that time … the infected were screened by nucleic acid tests and many of those in makeshift hospitals showed no symptoms. The epidemic now is so widespread that it has probably reached 70 per cent of the population, more than 20 to 30 times the number at that time,” Chen said.
He said the volume of patients in the emergency unit of his hospital has doubled to 1,600 people per day, 80 per cent of them Covid-related, with vulnerable groups such as the elderly or immunocompromised making up around half of these cases.
The hospital expanded its emergency capacity from four to eight consultation rooms and deployed additional medical staff from other departments, especially for the emergency unit, he added.
China has stopped counting the daily number of Covid infections after lifting restrictions last month, but the surge in cases has put the domestic health care system under intense pressure, with widespread infections among medical staff making the problem worse.
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