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Coronavirus China
ChinaPolitics

‘Near breaking point’: China shifts Covid focus to critical care with push for more hospital beds

  • Local health authorities urged to form networks to respond as peaks in cases hit throughout the system
  • Top-tier facilities told to expand capacity to help ease demand at the community and rural levels

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Medical workers attend to patients at the intensive care unit at Beijing Chaoyang hospital on Tuesday as the country struggles with a tidal wave of Covid-19 cases. Photo: Reuters
Zhuang Pinghuiin Beijing
China has told local health authorities to build more beds, train more personnel and be ready to support each other as the tidal wave of Covid-19 cases pushes some provinces to near “breaking point”.
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Jiao Yahui, director of the National Health Commission’s medical affairs department, said there were enough critical care beds in the system as a whole but provinces reaching a peak in cases were nearing capacity.

“Provinces that are currently experiencing a peak in battling severe cases are strained at nearly breaking point. [They] need to expend more of their resources on critical care beds or accelerate the turnover of such beds,” Jiao said on Tuesday.

A day earlier, China announced it would downgrade its response to Covid-19, putting management of the disease in the same category as that of HIV and viral hepatitis.

In guidelines on how to live with Covid-19, the State Council said the focus now would be on “preventing serious illnesses” to “maximise the protection of people’s lives and health and minimise the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development”.

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It said centralised quarantine and testing on arrival in the country would be scrapped and foreigners would only need to declare a negative PCR test from the previous 48 hours.

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