Health: Analysis: China’s Covid governance under pressure as Omicron spreads – Gulf Digital News

Health: Analysis: China’s Covid governance under pressure as Omicron spreads – Gulf Digital News

China's public health governance is expected to come under acute pressure in coming weeks as the biggest wave of Covid-19 cases since the 2020 Wuhan outbreak stretches medical resources, tests the country's ability to contain infections and strains the economy.

In the past 10 weeks, China has reported more new local symptomatic cases - more than 14,000 - than in all of 2021 amid the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, fuelling fears of hard lockdowns of cities and economic instability.

Some parts of China are already feeling the crunch as they scramble to test local populations and quarantine the infected under China's strict Covid-19 playbook, despite relatively low caseloads by global standards.

In the northeastern province of Jilin, the hardest-hit region in the current outbreak, affected cities are racing to prepare temporary hospitals. A local official said on Tuesday the province's epidemic prevention supplies will run dry in two to three days.

"The next two weeks are key to determining whether existing policies can really be effective in curbing infection growth or even reaching completely zero cases in one city as we saw last year," said Chen Zhengmin, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oxford.

China has stood firmly by its "dynamic"