After a high corona wave, the Chinese countryside is silent: ‘We made it’

53-year-old Mrs. Wang looks gray as she sits down on a narrow wooden bench near her home in her native village. She is tired, it is cold and there is no heating. She wears thick, padded pink trousers and large, black and red checkered slippers. And a green apron: soon she will have to go into the kitchen to cook for Chinese New Year.

She just returned that afternoon from the cremation of her 88-year-old maternal aunt in Chaohu, the capital of the district of the same name in central China’s Anhui province. The funeral was quick and simple. Only close relatives were present. Her aunt had been bedridden for much longer, she died of old-age ailments. Officially at least, because she also got corona. That eventually killed her, but it’s not on her death certificate.

Mrs. Wang tells it almost in a whisper and only when she sees that no one is listening. Mentioning the disease feels like breaking a taboo in this village: everyone wants to forget corona as soon as possible. “I also lost another aunt,” Wang adds. “He was 97 but still perfectly healthy. Also corona. But not officially either.” Then she disappears into the kitchen.

When Chinese people traveled en masse earlier this month to celebrate New Year with their rural families, even President Xi Jinping expressed concern. Only the elderly and small children live in rural areas. Would city dwellers take corona back to the villages with their poor care?

There are now harrowing stories about it high mortality in Shanxi province, among others and Hebei, but official death figures specific to rural areas are not yet available. And they may never come: especially in rural areas, people often die at home, without ever being tested.

Mrs Wang’s husband has probably also had corona. He’s just not sure. “When he got sick, there were hardly any self-tests available,” she says. “And what’s the point of getting tested if you don’t go to the doctor afterwards?” Many people in her village don’t want to just spend money on medical treatment: they prefer to save it for their grandchildren’s school. So they crawl into bed when they are sick and hope for the best.

Virgin area

About 80 percent of the entire Chinese population is said to have had corona by now, said leading Chinese epidemiologist Wu Zunyou a week ago. What exactly that was based on is not clear. There has been virtually no testing since December 7. There are hardly any other mechanisms to find out the numbers of infections. Some local governments are attempting to collect data through questionnaires.

But it is likely that the disease has spread at an unprecedented rate in China. China was an almost virgin territory for corona when the government decided on December 7 to let go of the zero-covid policy. Most people had been vaccinated more than a year ago and probably had little or no protection against infection. Omikron is also much more contagious than previous variants.

A rapid spread of the disease is good for the government. China can therefore quickly leave corona behind and pick up the thread. At least until the next wave. This is badly needed to get the economy going again.

In Mrs. Wang’s village, everyone now looks ahead. Mr. Hong, who supplies the lamps for major construction projects, still talks about how difficult it was to make money in 2022. He works in Hefei, the capital of Anhui province.

“It was not difficult to get orders, because there were enough construction projects. Hefei wants to get the official status of a first-class city, now it is still a second-class city,” says Hong. And for that you have to grow. “But nobody has the money to really pay for all those construction projects. Not even the government,” he says. His boss was therefore still in the office in the run-up to New Year, hoping to get as many old bills paid as possible.

But many people want to forget that too. “It wasn’t all that bad,” says a relative of Mr. Hong, who works in construction in another province. “We saved the best. And if you protect yourself a bit well, then corona doesn’t have to be that contagious at all,” he says, while, like many villagers, he no longer wears a face mask. A woman adds that corona is simply less severe in rural areas. “We have much cleaner air here than in the cities, so we get better faster,” she says.

Official death toll incredibly low

Forget, keep silent, pretend nothing ever happened. It is possible again because the largest corona peak now seems to be behind us. The need to sound the alarm as loudly as possible because otherwise a sick family member will not receive help, seems to be over. The old suffering is stored away and tucked away and erased from memory as much as possible.

How many people have died of corona in the meantime is still unclear. Just after the release of the zero-covid policy on December 7, China reported no more than five deaths per day across the country, but in mid-January the government suddenly adjusted the figure to almost 60,000 deaths. Another 13,000 deaths were added for the following week. This only concerns people who officially died of corona in hospitals.

It seems an incredibly low number. British Airfinity, a health data research company, treasure the number of deaths up to January 17 is about 600,000: more than eight times as many as what China itself counts.

Where do people from Mrs. Wang’s village die? If they get sick, they have to go to the small town of Huanglu, five kilometers away. There used to be a private doctor in the village, but he has retired and has never been replaced.

The hospital in Huanglu is deserted on the second day after New Year. Immediately to the right after the entrance are two white containers on a lawn. That is the fever clinic: everyone with an increase must report there first. This prevents the entire hospital from becoming infected immediately.

But today there is no one. There are no patients and no one behind the counter. A little further on, in the hall of the hospital itself, there is a pharmacist. There is also a manned counter where you can pay your bills: in China you usually have to do this in advance. “We now have enough tests and ibuprofen,” says the pharmacist. “But you only get it on prescription from the doctor, who is behind this,” he points to a dark corridor.

The door of an elderly doctor with a friendly face is open. The doctor wears a not quite white coat and a white cap. In his consulting room with concrete floor there is a light blue examination bed, a blood pressure monitor on his desk and some jars and bottles on the windowsill.

Big crowds already over

He also has no patients. Most people avoid hospitals at the beginning of the New Year and only come in an emergency. “We have enough corona tests,” he says, and to underline that, he returns a little later with three tests that he obtained from the pharmacist. But does the hospital also have the capacity and equipment to give corona patients extra oxygen? Are specific anti-corona drugs and oxygen meters available?

He recoils in his chair when it appears that he is dealing with a foreign journalist. “We are not busy at all,” he says. “There were only a few emergencies, but that was not about corona,” he adds. “If there are patients with corona, we send them to a larger hospital in Chaohu.”

Then he is called away for an emergency – real or imaginary – and does not return. A guard does appear, escorts the journalist outside and reports her presence to the local authorities. They will send two cars along for the rest of the day NRC to follow everywhere.

A closer look at the hospital fails, but it does look very different from hospitals and fever clinics in early December in Beijing. There was no hiding the fact that there were problems: they were visibly overrun and people complained. That is not the case in this hospital: there is peace and quiet.

Public Enemy No.1

The fever clinic of the Eighth People’s Hospital in Chaohu, the capital of the region, is also abandoned. Again, white, temporary containers at a distance from the hospital itself. There are only a few left, and it is not completely extinct. The people who come are only parents with small children who have a fever.

There is little to see, but even that little the eight guards who appear prefer to keep secret. “You can’t be here! Dangerous! Corona!” shouts a man in a blue uniform. In his excitement, he has forgotten for a moment that since the beginning of December corona has no longer been presented in China as public enemy no. 1, but as a kind of cold that you should not be too afraid of.

There is a petite woman in a white hazmat suit behind the counter of the fever clinic. “Yes, we are indeed the fever clinic here,” she confirms. Then a guard makes it clear to her with gestures that she should keep her mouth shut. Walking into the hospital itself is not an option: this way it remains invisible how the situation in the Eighth Volksziekenhuis really is.

Certainly according to the official figures, the worst is now over: the Chinese Center for Disease Control announced on Wednesday that the number of corona deaths in hospitals was 896 on January 23, compared to 4,273 on January 4.

They are nice, very accurate numbers, but those death numbers at least don’t include Mrs. Wang’s two dead relatives. No one in her family will complain about that. There’s no point, says Ms. Wang. She’s been accustomed all her life to resigning herself to the inevitable.