On Wednesday, China reported 3,290 Covid-19 instances for the previous day, as the country’s beleaguered health authorities announced that patients with minor illnesses should opt for centralised isolation rather than hospitalisation, as was previously the case.
As China struggles to contain the worst and widest Covid-19 epidemic since the virus was first found in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, the decision was made to maximise hospital resources.
Though health authorities across China continued to enforce severe lockdown measures affecting millions of people and conducted repeated mass tests on residents at walled off locations, the number of cases fell by half in the last 24 hours.
Jilin, the northeastern province that borders Russia and North Korea and is the epicentre of the continuing outbreak, has proven to be the hardest afflicted. It found 1,456 locally transmitted symptomatic cases, accounting for 60% of all cases in the previous 24 hours.
In the meantime, China has amended its Covid-19 hospitalisation and isolation restrictions in response to the spike in cases in order to prevent putting the country’s health-care system under strain.
Patients with no or only mild symptoms should be admitted to centralised isolation facilities, according to the NHC, while those with severe symptoms should be admitted to designated hospitals.
China Daily, a state-run publication, reported on Wednesday. A total of 1,860 of the almost 3,000 patients were symptomatic.
