Beijing’s pharmacy shelves are near empty due to soaring COVID-19 cases and high demand for fever or cold medicine.
Some residents have built up excessive reserves of self-tests and medicines in recent days, which have emptied the stocks of pharmacies.
Search engine Baidu reported that searches for the word “ibuprofen”, a fever and flu medication that is now on everyone’s lips in China, had increased by 430% in one week.
Beijing and its 22 million inhabitants are strongly affected by a wave of contamination, totally unprecedented in the city since the beginning of the pandemic and which has spread at lightning speed in recent days.
Last week, China drastically relaxed its health restrictions against the disease, which were intended to limit contamination and deaths as much as possible.