Rural China runs short of Covid drugs over lunar new year holiday
Wu, a 54-year-old retiree in China’s south-western Sichuan province, struggled to get hold of antiviral medication when her 92-year-old mother came down with Covid-19 this month.
“By the time I realised my mother had Covid, it had been two days since she had eaten or drunk anything,” she said.
Relatives in Shanghai rushed to send antiviral drugs by post after the local hospital and clinic ran out of supplies, but when the medicine arrived, Wu’s mother had already tested negative.
China’s failure to build robust defences in preparation for an inevitable Covid exit wave has created a legitimacy crisis for President Xi Jinping and his flagship zero-Covid policy.
“They have three years to prepare for this,” said one Shanghai-based pharmaceutical industry insider. “They didn’t have the right vaccines or the sufficient supply of drugs to cope with the case surge.”
As cases rise across China, for Wu’s mother, the recovery from Covid has proved long and painful.
She suffered a brain bleed, her daughter said, and there were still shadows on her lung scan. But since medical guidelines recommend patients take antiviral drugs within five days of infection, they did not use the medication they had.
“We wanted to use antivirals,” Wu said, “but don’t dare to”.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Eleanor Olcott
