Why did Covid-19 wave hit China’s countryside earlier than expected?

Returning migrant workers and students brought a surge to rural areas weeks ahead of the Lunar New Year mass migration

Many grass-roots clinics were caught off guard but while cases are falling, experts warn the greatest test lies ahead

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There are fewer than two practising doctors for every 1,000 people in China’s rural areas, where Covid-19 has been spreading rapidly. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 6:00pm, 12 Jan 2023

In nearly three decades as a village doctor, Zhu Wenbing has never seen his clinic under so much pressure, nor supplies of medicines run so low.

The worst moments were in late December, when the Covid-19 Omicron variant raged through his village in China’s eastern Shandong province. At its peak, Zhu was seeing more than 50 patients a day, and did not have enough medicines to treat them.

“All the Covid-related drugs were hard to get, and I kept phoning the [pharmaceutical company] salespeople and [township] clinics to make sure the patients could access the necessary medicines,” Zhu said. “The price of medicines soared, [and that is] so unfair to the patients.”

Zhu is one of just over a million doctors across China’s vast countryside who have been bracing for the arrival of the pandemic, after three years of protection under the country’s zero-Covid policy.

But the wave hit rural areas earlier than expected, leaving grass-roots hospitals and clinics struggling to cope.

The official travel season for Lunar New Year – the biggest annual human migration in the world – runs from January 7 to February 15 this year, and waves of infections were anticipated once it got under way.