As China's healthcare infrastructure is under unprecedented pressure due to COVID spreading at unimaginable speed, authorities have sent hundreds of healthcare workers, including critical care specialists, to the capital Beijing to ease the burden at heavily strained hospitals.<br />''<br />''Despite healthcare workers shortages in provinces, hundreds of doctors and nurses from Shandong province in eastern China and dozens from neighbouring Jiangsu have been sent to Beijing hospitals which has the top medical resources in the country showing the fragility of healthcare system.<br />''<br />''According to local media reports, Shenyang, Shandong and Hubei provinces have urgently recruited doctors and nurses to cope with the pressure of rising cases coming to hospitals. Even as officials are working hard to prepare more ICU beds, biggest challenge is the availability of trained critical care doctors and nursing staff.<br />''<br />''This has also affected the medical services to non-COVID cases.<br />''<br />''<br />''Chinese authorities have been sending healthcare staff to other provinces but to help in conducting mass testing under zero COVID policy. such moves to support hospitals was seen in 2020 when a huge contingent of doctors ' in thousands – was sent to Wuhan when COVID-19 devastated the city.<br />''<br />''<br />''China's capital has been battered by a surge of cases and the public has complained of drug and test kit shortages, long queues at fever clinics and the rising death toll following the government's abrupt relaxation of Covid-19 controls earlier this month.<br />''<br />''Officially, the Beijing government has announced only seven deaths since opening up as they further narrowed down the criteria. There were no official deaths announced in last three days as health authorities say only coronavirus patients who die from respiratory failure, are counted as Covid-19 deaths.<br />''<br />''But anecdotal evidence given by doctors and the public have provided a different picture amid criticism the government was ill-prepared and should have anticipated that relaxing the zero-Covid rules would lead to mass infection.<br />''<br />''A health data firm Airfinity from United Kingdom said this week that infections in China are likely to be more than a million a day with deaths at more than 5,000 a day, at odds with the official data.<br />''<br />''A big private Shanghai hospital has estimated half of the commercial hub's 25 million people would get infected by the end of next week. Many epidemiologists across the globe have estimated that China could face more than a million Covid deaths next year.<br />''<br />''China's abrupt and casual exit from controversial zero COVID policy in the face of protests and a slowing economy caught a weak health system unprepared, with hospitals scrambling for beds and blood, pharmacies for drugs and authorities racing to build fever clinics. Experts say this messed up exit from zero COVID policy is making the Chinese people pay the price who were earlier crushed under the policy.<br />''<br />''Under three years of zero-COVID policy, China did not focus on strengthening its ICU beds and hospitals rather it spent trillions of dollars on mass testing and quarantine. Even China's vaccination policy initially did not focus much on the elderly population along with the issue of less efficacy of Chinese vaccines.<br />''<br />''Chinese has not yet allowed any foreign vaccines including the better mRNA vaccines to be used by Chinese population. China's overall vaccination rate is above 90% but the rate for adults who have had booster shots drops to 57.9 per cent, and to 42.3 percent for people aged 80 and older, according to government data.<br />''<br />''A drive to vaccinate the elderly that began three weeks ago is yet to show any impact.<br />''<br />''The World Health Organisation (WHO) has said that it has not received any data from China on new Covid hospitalizations since Beijing lifted majority of its zero-Covid policy.<br />''<br />''The WHO has said gaps in data might be due to Chinese authorities simply struggling to tally cases. WHO has again called on China to share the data and conduct the studies which the agency had requested.<br />''<br />''In the meanwhile, lot of confusing messaging is happening from Chinese propaganda as the surprising end of zero Covid policy has suddenly thrown the official propaganda out of gear and the rampage of new infections and deaths is simply not helping it in downplaying the severity of the situation.<br />''<br />''<br />''<span style="color: #222222;">Life is thrown out of gear as businesses are shut due to staff being sick and surging online deliveries during home stay is getting severely delayed due to deliverymen being infected.</span>