China's abrupt end last month to the zero-COVID policy that the government had doggedly stuck to for three years and lauded as the reason it had thus far avoided the mass infections and death tolls seen overseas caught most by surprise.
Far more predictably, however, has been the outcome: the rapid spread of the virus across the country, causing untold numbers of infections and deaths and an acute shortage of everyday medicines used to treat the virus's symptoms like fever, coughing and potentially fatal secondary bacterial infections.
