At a hospital in the affluent Beijing district of Chaoyang, several dozen people lined up outdoors in near-freezing weather on Friday at a clinic designated for fever patients.

Some residents flocked to pharmacies, buying up stocks of at-home antigen Covid test kits.

Many chose to stay home, leaving the capital’s usually busy streets quiet except for the puttering of motorbikes driven by food delivery workers.

Beijing is bracing for what could be a surge in Covid cases, as controls that had kept the virus at bay for nearly three years have been abruptly abandoned following China’s reversal of its strict pandemic policy this week.

Across the country, officials have been scrambling to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed as more people become infected. At many of Beijing’s hospitals, health workers screen people who show up with fevers so as to identify those who are seriously ill and send home those with milder symptoms.

Part of the challenge for the ruling Communist Party is that less than 1 per cent of the people in China have had Covid before.

The general public has been told by state media for nearly three years that the virus leads to severe illness and death, a justification for the lockdowns and mass quarantines that set off widespread protests last month in a rare challenge to the government.

Health experts and Chinese officials are stepping up efforts to urge residents not to go to hospitals unless necessary.

With the help of the government’s propaganda apparatus, they have been assuring residents that they have little to fear from the Omicron variants currently spreading around the country.

“The infections are not scary,” Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory scientist who is highly regarded in China, said at a conference on Friday that was covered by state media.

“Ninety-nine per cent of the people who get infected can fully recover within 7 to 10 days,” Dr Zhong said.

“As long as we get plenty of rest, isolate ourselves and stay at home, we can recover quickly.”

As the government has moved away from mass testing and contact tracing to focus on ramping up vaccinations and treating those who are severely ill, the scale of China’s outbreaks is increasingly unclear.

New York Times News Service