Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
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BEIJING (Reuters) – For Zhang Yu, who runs a cafe in one of Beijing’s top tourist spots, business has never been so bad.
To contain the spread of the coronavirus, bars and cafes in the Wudaoying hutong – a top Lonely Planet destination built around a narrow lane – are permitted to provide take-away services only. Non-residents must show proof they have an appointment to enter the area.
Added to which, tourism has plummeted.
“Don’t mention it! This is supposed to be the peak season,” said Zhang, who has run her cafe for five years. “But there are almost no customers as they (authorities) don’t want to have people hanging around here.”
While China’s manufacturing and retail sectors are starting to get back to work as the pace of new infections slows sharply, tourism sites in Beijing remain a shadow of their former and bustling self.
China’s capital city has maintained the highest level of emergency response to the outbreak, so tourist attractions like the Forbidden City remain closed. A 14-day quarantine for new arrivals has stifled travel.
As a result, small business owners running restaurants, souvenir shops and tourism agencies are struggling.
Only a little over 20% of tourism-related businesses in Beijing had resumed operation as of the three-day Qingming national holiday in early April, a survey by on-demand delivery service giant Meituan Dianping showed.
HANGING ON
The only people present in Wudaoying on a recent afternoon were a few elderly residents sitting outside to enjoy the spring sunshine. A cat made its way lazily through empty rooftop bars.
“We used to see more customers in one hour in pre-virus days than we see in a whole day right now,” said a worker at a sandwich restaurant in Wudaoying.
In another popular area, Khazzy, a 32-year-old doctoral student who opened a restaurant last October, has had only four customers all day.
“There are almost no tourists coming to Beijing and the remaining locals have concerns about eating out,” Khazzy said as sunset approached.
Khazzy said he has let five of his 13 staff go and has no idea how long he can stay afloat financially even though his landlord has agreed to waive one month’s rent on the property in Qianmen, near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
More than half of the shops in Qianmen remain closed. The manager of a state-backed noodle restaurant said most of the closed stores are privately owned small businesses that can’t secure enough business to support their daily operations.
She said revenues at the noodle restaurant have plunged more than 80%, but staff salaries have not been cut.
Zhang, the cafe owner in Wudaoying, reckoned small businesses could hold on for the next three months.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Indore is a bustling commercial city
In early March, 40-year-old Ravi Dosi, a chest specialist in India, saw a baffling surge in patients with respiratory problems at outpatient clinics.
“There was almost a 50% jump in patients with upper respiratory issues and sore throat. They were not responding to antibiotics. Testing was still low and we didn’t really know what was going on,” Dr Dosi, who works at Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences, a 1,156-bed private medical college in the central city of Indore, told me.
Less than a fortnight later, Dr Dosi began seeing an uptick in admissions of Covid-19 patients. Around the end of March, the hospital was receiving 28 infected patients every day.
They had dry cough, fever, and difficulty breathing. Their blood oxygen levels were low. They were reporting loss of taste and smell.
In the first wave of patients, nearly a dozen came from far-flung districts, more than 150km (93 miles) from Indore, a bustling commercial city in Madhya Pradesh state. The state has now become a hotspot, with nearly 400 confirmed infections out of the more than 6,400 infections and nearly 200 deaths across the country so far.
By the second week of April, Dr Dosi and his team of 100 doctors and nearly an equal number of nursing staff working 24/7 in three shifts, were treating 144 Covid-19 patients. (Thirty-one had been treated and sent home already.)
A total of 38 patients were in intensive care. Twenty-one of them were critical. There had been seven deaths. “We are handling the largest number of Covid-19 patients in India,” Vinod Bhandari, a surgeon and chairman of the hospital, told me.
Doctors now believe that the infection was spreading in the community long before the government admitted to it, and testing slowly ramped up. Until two weeks ago, Indian health authorities had been denying community transmission.
Image caption The hospital in Indore has more than 140 patients
Now a new study by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) using surveillance data from 41 labs in the country has hinted at community transmission: 52 districts in 20 states and union territories reported Covid-19 patients. Some 40% of the cases did not report any history of international travel or contact with a known case. (The survey was based on swabs collected from nearly 6,000 patients who tested positive between 15 February and 19 March.)
Back in the hospital in Indore, the doctors are battling the surge in infections.
Three isolation wards spread over two floors floors are stacked with patients. (The hospital has earmarked 525 beds for Covid-19 patients.) Isolation wards have younger patients with mild infection, while elderly patients with more severe symptoms are in intensive care. The oldest patient is a 95-year-old man, and the youngest is a four-month-old boy.
The team of doctors handling patients includes chest specialists, anaesthetists, microbiologists, and dermatologists. There are patients with a lot of underlying medical conditions – diabetes, hypertension, even cancer – so all the specialists have been called in to help with the treatment.
Dr Dosi wakes up early, puts on protective gear – scrubs, face masks and shields, N95 masks, gowns, double gloves and shoe covers – before going on his rounds of the patients. Doctors say they are not facing a shortage of gear yet.
They are using 22 ventilators to help the critical patients breathe, and also providing oxygen supplies to others using nasal cannulas (nose prongs).
In the isolation wards, patients are given oral medication – antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine (commonly known as HCQ), an anti-malarial drug – and directed to maintain social distancing and wash their hands regularly.
Image caption The isolation wards are packed with patients
“I have never seen a challenge and crisis like this in my career. I have heard stories about an outbreak of plague in Surat [in 1994]. But this seems to be much bigger. The biggest challenge is to keep hopes alive and be positive,” says Dr Dosi.
Keeping hopes up for patients in isolation can be taxing. Three tests, say doctors, are being done for the infection – if the first test comes out positive, the patient remains in isolation for two weeks, and is tested twice on two days after the quarantine period. If the last two tests come back negative, the patient is discharged. If not, the patient has to stay in isolation for another two weeks. “It is a tough grind, mentally,” says one doctor.
For the last three weeks, Dr Dosi has been living in the hospital, away from his wife, two sons and parents. His father is a retired pathologist. They communicate via hurried video calls, between his frantic trips to the isolation wards and intensive care.
I ask him when does he expect this to “get over”, so that he can go home.
“In a couple of weeks,” he says. “The lockdown should have helped to slow down the infection.”
Dr Dosi is alluding to the strict 21-day lockdown India imposed on 24 March to halt the spread of the infection.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption Health officials have been denying community transmission
Things are getting better, he says.
“I am getting 10 patients for admission in isolation wards, and two patients severe enough for intensive care every day now. Earlier this week, it was 50:50.”
It is possibly too early to hazard a guess about when admissions will slow down to single digits. As more people are tested, the number of patients can easily rise again.
It’s been unrelenting, Dr Dosi says.
Early, on Friday, I sent him a text to find out what was going on.
SHENYANG, April 5 (Xinhua) — Huo Chunlei, who runs a hotpot restaurant in Shenyang, capital of northeast China’s Liaoning Province, said he did not lay off any of his staff, although the restaurant is having difficulties for reopening after two months of closure in China’s nationwide measures of coronavirus control.
A few weeks after Chinese provincial-regions with low risk of the novel coronavirus gradually resumed work and production, shops and eateries have reopened, and roads become bustling again, as hundreds of millions of people confined at home for weeks in compliance with epidemic prevention rules get back to a normal life.
Huo’s restaurant has been in operation for a week. Only half of the tables are filled at dinnertime. The revenue is barely enough to cover the expenses of the house rent and employee wages, he said.
However, he said his business is able to survive because of the government’s bailout policies. For example, the approval of deferred payment of social insurance premiums for his employees alone can save him 80,000 yuan (about 11,250 U.S. dollars) a month.
“The staff are willing to stay, as we are all confident in tiding over the difficulties together,” he said.
The local governments at all levels have rolled out a slew of measures to shore up the catering business, including cutting taxes, reducing house rent as well as water and electricity fees.
The governments in Liaoning, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces have issued coupons with a value ranging from 10 million yuan to 100 million yuan to encourage people to spend on dining out.
Before the production resumption, there were some consumer councils’ surveys showing that consumers had suppressed consumption desire for dining out and shopping as well as going to movie theaters, gymnasiums and tourist spots after the epidemic crisis ends.
“The so-called retaliatory consumption has not yet appeared in the catering industry, as people are still wary about the infection risk, but there will be a gradual recovery growth,” said Chen Heng, executive director of Hainan Hotel and Catering Industry Association in the southernmost Chinese province of Hainan.
“Before reopening, we increased the distances between tables, but with reduced tables, there are still many empty tables at dinner time. My restaurant used to have all seats full and even queues,” said Huo.
Like Huo, Lin Lunheng, founder of the Fuzhou Super Dinner Co. Ltd. in southeast China’s Fujian Province, is also worried about business.
“Although the chain stores have reopened, revenues have decreased by 70 percent compared with that before the epidemic. This is a big blow to restaurants,” said Lin.
The Italian style chain restaurant has offered e-coupons to draw customers.
As the spring weather is getting more and more pleasant, consumers’ desire for dining out and travel is growing. According to a survey report jointly released by the China Travel Academy and Trip.com Group on March 19, Chinese are longing for tours across the country, with Yunnan, Hainan and Shanghai among the top destinations.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 