Covid in China: According to a report, Beijing will soon start distributing Pfizer’s Covid vaccine.
Beijing:
As Covid-19 cases in China continue to increase, Beijing will soon begin distributing Pfizer’s Covid-19 treatment Paxlovid to public health centers in the coming days, CNN reported citing media. state media on Monday.
The report comes as the city grapples with an unprecedented wave of infections that has overwhelmed the city’s hospitals and empty drug shelves.
According to the state-run China News Service, after being trained, community doctors will distribute drugs to Covid-19 patients and provide information on how to use them.
“We have received notice from officials, but it is not clear when the medicine will arrive,” CNN quoted an employee at a local community health center in Beijing’s Xicheng district as saying.
Paxlovid remains the only foreign drug to treat Covid that has been approved by China’s regulator for nationwide use, but accessing the drug is a challenging process.
Following nationwide protests over its no-covid policy, China abruptly abandoned its policy last month after nearly three years of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing.
The rapid policy change has caused panic buying of cold and fever medicines, leading to significant shortages at pharmacies and online shopping platforms. According to CNN, long queues have become the norm outside fever clinics and hospitals in the capital Beijing and elsewhere.
Chang Che, Asia technology correspondent for The New York Times (NYT) writes: After China abandoned its “no Covid” restriction policy about two weeks ago, the number of people infected with corona virus in the region shows that disease outbreaks and overwhelmed health care systems.
However, the magnitude and extent of the first nationwide outbreak remains a mystery as official figures from the central government remain low.
At a news conference on Sunday, an official in Zhejiang province, home to 65 million people, estimated that daily Covid cases there had exceeded one million.
In the eastern city of Qingdao, with a population of 10 million, a health minister said on Friday that there are about half a million new cases a day, a number that he predicts will rise sharply in the coming days. local news site.
In Dongguan, a city of seven million people in central Guangdong province, a report by the city’s health commission on Friday estimated there were between 250,000 and 300,000 new cases per day.
And in northwestern Shaanxi province, officials in Yulin, a city of about 3.6 million people, recorded 157,000 infections on Friday, with models estimating that more than a third of the population Several cities have been infected, according to local media.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
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