As Covid cases in China continue to rise, Beijing will soon begin distributing Pfizer’s Covid-19 drug Paxlovid to community health centers in the coming days, CNN reported, citing state media on Monday.
The report comes as the city grapples with an unprecedented wave of infections that has severely affected its hospitals and emptied pharmacy shelves.
According to the state-run China News Service, after receiving training, community doctors would dispense the drug to Covid-19 patients and provide information on how to use it.
“We have received the notice from the officials, but it is not clear when the medicines will arrive,” a worker at a local community health center in Beijing’s Xicheng district was quoted as saying by CNN.
Paxlovid remains the only foreign covid drug that has been approved by China’s regulator for use nationwide, but access to the drug is a challenging process.
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Following nationwide demonstrations over the zero-covid policy, China abruptly abandoned its policy last month after nearly three years of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing.
The rapid change in policy has led to panic buying of fever and cold medicines, leading to significant shortages at pharmacies and online shopping platforms. Long lines have become the norm outside fever clinics and hospital wards in the country’s capital, Beijing, and elsewhere, according to CNN.
After China abandoned its restrictive “covid zero” policy about two weeks ago, regional numbers of people infected with coronavirus point to explosive outbreaks and overstretched health systems, writes Chang Che, Asia technology correspondent for The New York Times. (NYT).
However, the intensity and scale of the country’s first national outbreak remains largely a mystery, as official central government figures remain low.
At a press conference on Sunday, an official in Zhejiang province, home to 65 million people, estimated that daily Covid cases had exceeded 1 million.
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In the eastern city of Qingdao, population 10 million, a health minister said on Friday there were about half a million new cases each day, a number he expected to rise sharply in the coming days, local news sites reported.
In Dongguan, a city of seven million in the central province of Guangdong, a report by the city’s health commission on Friday estimated between 250,000 and 300,000 new cases a day.
And in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, 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 city’s population had already been infected. according to local media.
