Rural residents worry for the elderly as Covid-19 rips across China
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Mr Tang Shunping receiving intravenous drip treatment at a village clinic in Lezhi county in China's Sichuan province on Dec 29, 2022.
PHOTO: REUTERS
LEZHI - In a busy village clinic in Lezhi county, south-west China’s Sichuan province, on Thursday, 59-year-old Ms Yang waited anxiously as her husband received an intravenous drip in the adjacent room.
For more than a week he has had a fever, cough, chills and other Covid-19-like symptoms, she said, like millions of other Chinese caught in a coronavirus wave after the authorities dismantled zero-Covid policies in December 2022.
Experts say the elderly in rural areas may be particularly vulnerable because of vaccine hesitancy and inadequate medical resources. The Chinese New Year festival in January 2023, when hundreds of millions will travel to their home towns, will add to the risk.
“I’m worried, I’m scared,” an emotional Ms Yang said between frequent glances at her husband, a construction worker surnamed Xiong. “This isn’t just a light illness like they are saying online.”
Mr Xiong, who has received three shots of China’s domestically produced vaccine, was confident he would feel better soon. But he was concerned about reinfection and said things were better before the reopening.
“Practically everyone at my construction site has been infected,” he said. “Since the opening up, the virus has spread everywhere.”
The couple, like several others interviewed for this report, declined to give their full names, a common practice in China for people who agree to speak to reporters.
Next to Mr Xiong in the small office-size treatment room at the village clinic, four other patients – all but one elderly and all on intravenous drips – lay coughing intermittently.
“It’s a bit worse than the original cold,” said Mr Tang Shunping, 80. “I was taking cold and flu supplements and I was fine, but now they don’t work any more.”
On the other side of the room, Madam Chen Lifen, 86, who suffers from other conditions including heart disease and high blood pressure, was accompanied by her daughter and full-time caregiver, Ms Liao Xiaofeng.
Madam Chen has not been vaccinated. The family had concerns after hearing stories online of possible side effects, Ms Liao said.
Several locals in the area, around 90 minutes east of Sichuan province’s capital, Chengdu, said that although the virus is everywhere, it is “as the state says, just like a cold”, reflecting the recent about-face in messaging from the Chinese authorities.
Ms Liao Xiaofeng sitting by an oxygen concentrator with her mother, Madam Chen Lifen.
Patient numbers more than doubled
Dr Chen Changying, a doctor in Yongquan, a small town near Lezhi county, said that since China ended nearly three years of curbs, patient numbers have more than doubled to around 100 a day. Most patients have the same symptoms suggesting a Covid-19 infection, and most are elderly, she said.
“I’m definitely worried,” Dr Chen said. “Many elderly people have underlying diseases such as chronic bronchitis, and this virus can easily lead to a lung infection.”
Amid a nationwide wave of infections, which experts say could have reached hundreds of millions, China is scrambling to reinforce overwhelmed hospitals and restock pharmacies.
Patients waiting for medicine at a village clinic in Lezhi county.
Paxlovid, the Pfizer-made Covid-19 medicine, is in particularly high demand, with many Chinese trying to get it abroad and have it shipped to China.
China’s top health body instructed the local authorities to “promote” and organise traditional Chinese medicine to treat Covid-19, state media reported on Thursday.
Pharmacies short of drugs
Ms Wang, 57, who has run a Chinese and Western medicine pharmacy in Yongquan with her husband for decades, said that the weeks since reopening have been the busiest they have ever known, and that drugs are in short supply.
Many people have stockpiled medicine because of the sudden wave of infections, she said.
In Lezhi county, Ms Liao, a farmer with two children whose husband is working in a faraway province, bought an oxygen concentrator online to help with her mother’s breathing.
Ms Liao does not plan to take her mother to the county hospital or a facility in a bigger city because she worries it will be costly and difficult to see a doctor.
She and others in Lezhi said things were better when Covid-19 curbs were in place.
“It used to be good when the virus was well controlled,” Ms Liao said. “When it was controlled, there was no such phenomenon. Now they don’t manage it any more, so all the young and old are getting infected.” REUTERS