Coronavirus: how the Shanghai outbreak exposed the Chinese health system’s fragility

Name: Shanghai reopens after two-month Covid lockdown, but how fast can life return to normal?
Uploaded: 2022-06-05T22:00:21.000Z
Duration: 3 min 46 s
Description: Shanghai reopens after two-month Covid lockdown, but how fast can life return to normal?

The city is a lesson in how a wave of infections can drain health resources under strict zero Covid

Zero Covid is a self-fulfilling process and self-defeating and ‘could bring collateral damage to the economy and society’, says global health analyst

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Some 1,091 healthcare workers returned to Hubei province on 31 May, 2022 Tuesday afternoon after spending 59 days in Shanghai as medical help. Photo: Weibo

Zhuang Pinghui

Published: 6:00am, 6 Jun 2022

On Tuesday afternoon, more than 1,000 health workers returned to Hubei province after spending 59 days in Shanghai working as medical help, while another 134 stayed behind to attend to serious Covid-19 patients.

“I am very happy to be able to finally return home. Not being wanted any more means Shanghai is back to normal,” Cheng Fang, head nurse at Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, said on local TV.

They are among about 50,000 health workers from across the country – including from the military – who came to attend to Shanghai’s medical needs in its battle against the worst Covid-19 surge the country has seen.

During their stay, they carried out nucleic testing, treated patients with traditional Chinese medicine, managed mild cases in temporary hospitals and treated serious Covid-19 patients as well those who had mild Covid-19 but serious comorbidities.

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Shanghai reopens after two-month Covid lockdown, but how fast can life return to normal?

By June 1, when the city finally came out of lockdown, more than 620,000 people had been infected and 588 died in the wave that began in early March.

The fact that Shanghai – the most developed city in mainland China, and with top medical resources – still needed large-scale medical help to overcome the surge showcases how fragile China’s health system is under zero-Covid when it is hit by the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

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