IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON CHINA
China was the first country to bare the brunt of the Covid 19 virus, which led to the rise of one of the deadliest pandemic attacks across the globe. How must have been the impact of this pandemic on China? Are you curious to know about the status of the Chinese economy, population and Healthcare sector during the COVID-19 period?
Through this article, Hospacxx Healthcare Consultancy shares with you key information on the overall status of the People’s Republic of China during COVID-19, along with critical survival measures that were implemented by the Chinese government to support the public’s survival during these hardships.
INCIDENCE OF COVID-19 IN CHINA
According to WHO and a published article from the Journal of Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology, COVID-19 began as a sudden rise in the number of pneumonia cases due to unknown causes in the city of Wuhan, China around December 2019. It was then around January 2020, that the Chinese authorities identified a novel coronavirus named as “2019-nCOV”, as the cause for the surge in number of cases for Acute respiratory diseases. The infection was originated in Huanan seafood and animal market in Wuhan city of Hubei province and it provided some link to an animal to human transmission through the sale of seafood and live animals.
Subsequently, the infection was noticed in increasing number of patients inside as well as outside the Wuhan city, who did not have exposure to animal markets and this suggested person to person transmission. The novel coronavirus was found to be highly contagious and has rapidly spread across the world within a span of 2-3 months. On February 19, 2020, WHO coined the term COVID-19 and declared this novel coronavirus disease as a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
COVID-19 IMPACT ON THE POPULATION
China had observed the maximum number of cases and COVID-19 related deaths between January and February-2020. According to a report by Jason et. al, for the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) was higher in the early stages of the outbreak (17% for cases) and reduced to 0.7% for patients with symptom onset after 1 February. The onset of symptoms peaked around January 23rd to 26th, then began to decline up to February 11th.
Most cases were aged 30 to 79 years of age (87%), 1% for individuals aged ≤ 9 years, another 1% for individuals aged 10 to 19 years, and 3% 80 years or older. The Case Fatality Rate was 2.3% (1023 deaths/44 672 confirmed cases). Patients with comorbid conditions had much higher CFR rates. Those with no comorbidities had a CFR of 0.9%. Critical cases had a CFR of 49%, no deaths occurred among those with mild or even severe symptoms.
As of 2022, along with the latest outbreak of the 4th wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Shanghai, China, the country has total of 185,035 cases, out of which 4,641 cases are deaths and 151,407 cases were recovered.
THE CHINESE ECONOMY DURING THE PANDEMIC PERIOD
According to a report by International Review of Applied Economics, responding to the outbreak of COVID-19, the Chinese authorities had launched a series of measures to contain the pandemic. There was a large-scale lockdown across China. While social distancing rule had not been popular, the 14-day quarantine period measure had been widely adopted across China. As the result, the Chinese economy was significantly affected.
It was observed that China’s (production approach-based) national economic output contracted 6.8% on a year-on-year basis in the first Quarter of 2020. This is the worst performance of the Chinese economy since it started its national economic accounting system in 1992. The most severely impacted is the accommodation and catering sector, which contracted 35.3%, followed by manufacturing sector (26%) then wholesale and retail sector (17.8%). As this was during the lockdown period, people would significantly reduce their business or personal travels.
China’s national tourism revenue has dropped 68.8% on a year-on-year basis (People.com.cn 2020a). Also, as people had to stay at home, the wholesale and retail sector was also significantly affected.
However, the IT sector (information transmission, software and information technology) and financial service sector are the only two that experienced a growth. The main reason is the rising online services during the lockdown period like entertainment, shopping, education, work and medical consultation have increasingly become digitalized.
HEALTHCARE SECTOR DURING THE PANDEMIC PERIOD
COVID-19 posed a tremendous public health threat on China with a cumulative number of cases. With the launch of Public Health Emergency Response, the central government was capable to respond to this pandemic in a timely and powerful way by mobilizing healthcare and other relevant resources across different regions within the whole country.
According to a research article by Weiwei Xu et. al for the journal Health Policy & Technology, the Chinese central government had mobilized healthcare resources including healthcare personnel, medical materials and other needed resource to Wuhan in a highly effective way. There are three specific characteristics in China’s approach against the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Timely and highly stringent measures. The Chinese government was able to mandate measures with huge impacts on the society in a short notice at the beginning of the pandemic and revise the measures in a relatively flexible way as the pandemic evolved. People showed high level of compliance to these measures. This is mainly caused by the intense public campaigns and advocacies via social media led by the government. Compliance to the measures is one of the keys to controlling the pandemic.
- Mandatory use of tracing technologies without much restrictions. In the Chinese culture, life was more important than one’s privacy. Thus, only few debates regarding privacy took place in the public domain. This allowed a smooth implementation of mandatory tracing for better detection & recovery rate of COVID Cases.
- Intense use of healthcare resources in disease treatment. All patients who were diagnosed with COVID-19 were institutionalized, regardless of severity of the disease. This led to a high pressure on the Healthcare systems. From a clinical perspective, this is waste of healthcare resources compared to home isolation of patients with minor symptoms. However, home isolation which was in practice, was not feasible in most urban areas of China due to people’s housing conditions. In the long run, China might need to consider a more cost-effective way of treatment.
In the initial phases of the COVID pandemic, there were 28 designated hospitals for treating COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, providing 8000 to 10,000 sickbeds. 42,600 healthcare professionals from other regions in China were transferred to Wuhan to support the local health staff. 48 hospitals more (including two newly-built hospitals specifically for COVID-19) with over 26,000 beds were designated for COVID-19 treatment. Furthermore, temporary hospitals (Fangcang) with over 13,000 beds were setup to isolate confirmed patients with mild symptoms. Over 18,000 ventilators, including 3000 invasive ones were produced and delivered to the Wuhan region between January and early April.
Capacity to produce essential protective medical materials (face masks, protective eyeglasses etc.) substantially increased. China had capacity for producing 3.4 million medical N95 masks, 0.29 million medical isolation face masks and 1.5 million sets of disposable medical protective suits per day.
Thereby, the routine healthcare services were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. With the Wuhan and Hubei Province experiencing the start of an abrupt, heavy demand in healthcare resources, the healthcare system was over-loaded within a few weeks. In other regions, healthcare disruption was mainly caused by measures taken to prevent and control the epidemic, such as lockdown and social distancing. Except for emergency cases, other types of healthcare services were on hold for a very extended period of time.
With the steady recovery from the pandemic over time, the provision of Out-patient and other elective healthcare services had gradually resumed. By mid of May 2020, overall healthcare service provision reached 85% compared to the same period in 2019 (with some regions reaching 100%).
According to a study by Haolang Hiu, the outbreak of epidemic had increased the demand for Internet medical consultation, pharmaceutical distribution, and pharmaceutical retail. China’s total health expenditure accounts for 6.4% in GDP.
The export of medical products has soared. With the spread of the epidemic, some medical device companies have received orders from Europe, North America, Latin America and other countries. For example, the infrared temperature thermometer equipment produced by Andon Health Co., Ltd. has been used on overseas e-commerce platforms. The sales amount is more than 4,000 units.
Yet, there is still a large gap in medical and health investment compared with developed countries. In the long term, the outbreak of epidemic has exposed the insufficient construction of the medical and health system, and the subsequent government will continue to increase investment in medical and health services, especially the prevention of infectious diseases.
CONCLUSION
Though China was the first country to face the dreadful effects of the COVID 19 pandemic, it was one of the first countries to take stringent measures like social distancing and isolation during lockdowns, to rapidly bring down the rate of infectious spread among the public. Though the pandemic had a greater deal of negative impact on the country’s economic growth and disease burden on the healthcare systems, there was also scope for new opportunities that led to the adaption and growth of advancements like in digitalization of healthcare systems and increased demand & supply of pharmaceuticals. This indicates that China is always creating ways for giving opportunities for foreign investments and private companies to be a part of the country’s progression to a better future.
Hospacxx Healthcare Consultancy has worked across Indian and International States on Hospital Projects for Business Process Development, Service Quality Assurance, Financial Management and more. For more information, you can visit the company website on www.hospaccxconsulting.com or contact us directly.
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