But with unevenly distributed medical resources, China will struggle to deal with the waves ahead. Its highest tier hospitals are limited to large cities while rural areas – home to about 36 per cent of China’s 1.4 billion people – have only lower level hospitals and township clinics designed for immediate care.
The directive on Sunday asked rural hospitals to modify their healthcare system to link the three levels of county, township, and village, and to get support from hospitals ranked from second-tier urban general hospitals up to county-level hospitals.
The directive urged provincial hospitals to set up a work team to inspect rural areas, send professionals and establish an online medical collaboration network with county hospitals to improve pandemic management in rural areas.
Meanwhile, the State Council said county hospitals must achieve several goals by the end of December: to increase the number of ICU beds and professional medical staff, build up buffer zones and set up areas for the department of infectious diseases.
“County hospitals … should ensure that the number of comprehensive ICU beds used for the treatment of critically-ill patients infected with the coronavirus is not less than 4 per cent of the total number of beds in hospital,” the notice stated.
“One ICU bed should be equipped with one doctor and 2.5-3 nurses, each shift is 8-12 hours. On the basis of the routine allocation, 20-30 per cent of medical staff should be added as a backup force.”
In November, Chinese officials said there were only four ICU beds per 100,000 people in the country. Soon after, National Health Commission official Guo Yanhong said China would build stronger capacity to treat patients with different levels of severity, handle severe cases in designated Covid-19 hospitals and increase ICU beds to 10 per cent of the total number of beds.
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Last Friday, the NHC said the number of ICU beds had risen to 10 per 100,000 people, without elaborating on the rapid rise in capacity.
The guideline further called on rural areas to build a hierarchical diagnosis and care system, including treating asymptomatic and mild cases at home and transferring severe and critical cases to designated hospitals, or even higher-tier hospitals.
Village clinics should establish more fever clinics, which should be set up in 90 per cent of village clinics by the end of March, the State Council added.
“All localities should provide 15-20 per cent of the population served by township clinics with traditional Chinese medicine, antipyretic, cough and other symptomatic treatment drugs and rapid antigen test kits,” it highlighted.
Lately, as China’s zero-Covid restrictions ease, demand has been surging for rapid antigen test kits and drugs after panic buying by residents.
