According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hospitals in China look to be getting busier as worries about a new Covid-19 epidemic hitting the nation grow.
ICUs are busy, according to Dr. Michael Ryan, despite claims from administrators that patient numbers are “quite low”.
China’s official statistics indicate that no one passed away from Covid on Wednesday, but doubts persist about the disease’s true toll.
As the latest Covid surge strikes China, hospitals in Beijing and other places have been filling up recently.
As part of its zero Covid strategy, China has set rigorous health regulations since 2020.
However, following historic demonstrations against the tight regulations, the administration halted the majority of those measures two weeks ago.
The number of cases has since soared, raising fears of a high mortality rate among the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable.
Despite the rise, the official figures show only five people died from Covid on Tuesday and two on Monday.
It has led to WHO emergencies chief Dr Ryan urging China to provide more information about the latest spread of the virus.
He said: “In China, what’s been reported is relatively low numbers of cases in ICUs, but anecdotally ICUs are filling up.
“We’ve been saying this for weeks that this highly infectious virus was always going to be very hard to stop completely, with just public health and social measures.”
Speaking during a weekly news conference in Geneva WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he is “very concerned over the evolving situation in China”.
He appealed for specific data on disease severity, hospital admissions and intensive care requirements.
Dr Ryan added that “vaccination is the exit strategy” to coronavirus outbreaks.
China has developed and produced its own vaccines, which have been shown to be less effective at protecting people against serious Covid illness and death than the mRNA vaccines used in much of the rest of the world.
His comments come as the German government announced on Wednesday it had sent its first batch of BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines to China.
The German vaccines are to be administered initially to expats in China – estimated to be about 20,000.
It is the first foreign Covid-19 vaccine to be delivered to China, although no details have been released about the time or the size of the delivery.
Last month during a visit to Beijing, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pressed for the vaccine to be made freely available to Chinese citizens as well.
