Lily Wang tested positive for COVID-19 in three days.
The 29-year-old lives in isolation in her small apartment in Shenzhen and currently has a high fever and sore throat.
Despite her own illness, Wang’s thoughts were with her grandmother, who has been spared illnesses so far thanks to her parents’ quick action.
“My parents took my grandmother out of town in time,” Wang said over the phone between coughing attacks.
Two days after taking her grandmother to see relatives in the countryside, Wang’s parents both fell ill.
Almost all of Wang’s work colleagues are also affected by COVID, she adds.
All over China, those who can afford it are getting their elderly relatives out of big cities to protect them from succumbing to the COVID-19 wave that is currently afflicting the country.
“The COVID situation is really bad right now,” 24-year-old Shuwen Lu told CNN Breaking News via a WeChat connection from her home in Beijing.
Lu, who is also currently fighting a COVID infection, told how her grandparents were helped from Beijing to a small village where the family has a house.
“Had they stayed in the city, they might soon have joined the countless elderly people who are dying,” said Lu.
Since authorities began lifting China’s strict COVID restrictions in early December, numerous reports have surfaced of people contracting the virus, hospitals being overwhelmed with patients, and the country’s crematoria struggling to keep pace with the influx of bodies arriving at their doors.
It was similar stories that prompted sources speaking to CNN Breaking News to evict their elderly relatives from built-up areas.
“My family decided it was safest for my grandparents to get them out of Beijing so they could get through the COVID storm safely from the crowds,” Lu explained.
In the cities of Fuzhou and Shanghai, sources also told CNN Breaking News about elderly family members heading out into the countryside or into smaller village communities to escape the COVID wave that has arisen since China suspended its zero-COVID policy.
Elderly people are at risk
Elderly people are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 infections, and according to reports, two thirds of people aged 80 and over in China have been vaccinated, with around 40 percent having received a booster shot as part of the current wave of infections.
Lower vaccination rates among older people can be attributed in part to the Chinese vaccination strategy at the start of the pandemic, when vaccines were originally preferred for key workers to ensure that the economy did not grind down during major outbreaks.
By the time large swaths of the elderly population were vaccinated, authorities had introduced the zero COVID strategy, and the initial successes in protecting people delayed prioritizing all older people who should be vaccinated.
The zero COVID strategy had protected China’s seniors from serious illnesses for almost three years by keeping fewer contagious COVID variants in check. The directive protected but also meant that older people were not protected against previous infections.
Given the rapid reopening of Chinese society, the strategy of recent years has resulted in millions of people being poorly protected against severe COVID infections.
Vaccination skepticism in China — particularly over whether older people should be vaccinated or not — has also contributed to a veritable flood of problems facing the country.
Lu and Wang both said their grandparents had not been vaccinated against COVID.
“Of course, my grandparents aren’t vaccinated,” Lu said when asked. “Who knows what could happen at their advanced age if they get an injection,” she said.
Wang’s grandmother has diabetes and several other health problems and thought better about getting vaccinated.
“She’s worried, and my family is also worried that her poor health won’t last a vaccination. So why risk that?
Official figures versus reality
According to official Chinese reports and COVID figures, there is no cause for concern.
The official narrative is that the abandonment of the zero COVID strategy was as successful as it was when the same strategy was an undeniable principle of Chinese governance.
Director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases, Zhang Wenhong, told local media on Thursday that he had visited several nursing homes in Shanghai and that the number of elderly people struggling with severe symptoms was low. Wenhong said he expected the peak of infections to be reached within a week.
China officially reported 4,128 new symptomatic cases and no new deaths on Friday. In total, there have only been a handful of deaths related to COVID-19 since restrictions were lifted earlier this month, according to official figures.
This story is in sharp contrast to images shared on social media and reports of overburdened crematoria, overcrowded hospitals, the establishment of fever centers — to relieve hospitals — and panicked purchases of flu medicines.
Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing estimates from China’s top health authority, that nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with COVID-19 in a single day this week.
Throughout their handling of COVID, Chinese authorities tended to provide an incomplete picture of the situation in order to put leadership decisions in the best possible light, said Associate Professor Yao-Yuan Yeh, who teaches Chinese studies at the University of St. Thomas in the United States.
“Despite the current chaos, it is therefore very unlikely that the Chinese government will admit that it has made mistakes in the zero COVID strategy or the subsequent opening up of society,” said Yao-Yuan Yeh.
“On the contrary, they will highlight the elements that make their policies appear successful, while downplaying or simply omitting incidents that indicate failure,” he said.
The omission of facts that point to failure was revealed this week when a leading Chinese medical expert announced that in future, only deaths caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure following a COVID-19 infection would be classified as COVID-19 deaths.
The change in classification was criticized by disease experts outside China. They said the new classification would result in a sharp undercount of the actual number of COVID deaths — something that Chinese authorities have been accused of since the first outbreak in Wuhan in 2019.
“This time around, the authorities are trying to underestimate the figures that suggest that the Chinese government has gone from a crisis caused by the zero COVID policy to a new crisis triggered by the rapid dismantling of the zero COVID policy,” said Yao-Yuan Yeh.
In Shenzhen, Wang only hopes that the crises will end soon so that she can once again experience life without COVID.
“And I hope my grandmother survives to experience it too,” she said.