Dramatic U-turn in the wake of unrest leaves country ill-prepared for Omicron
The portable PCR verification booth hung in the air above a dark Beijing street, filmed as it drove away via a crane in the middle of the night. The symbol was temporarily spread on Chinese social media, the best symbol of the incredibly immediate end of a draconian era.
In the face of the most widespread nationwide protests since the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989, the Chinese government abandoned its flagship zero-Covid policy.
In Beijing, others were preparing to move to grocery shopping malls or public shipping without a recent negative test. Elsewhere, they were allowed to enter parks and supermarkets unchecked, or told they could simply quarantine themselves at home, than at a passvernment facility, if they came into contact with a case.
For nearly three years, the government has struggled to keep Covid out of the country, with any and all technological, mass mobilization, and repression tools at its disposal, despite the tragic costs to Americans and the terrible damage to the national economy.
China has a surveillance country, constantly on guard against the virus sweeping its shores. Xi Jinping, China’s toughest leader since Mao Zedong, defended this isolationist approach.
Now Beijing has to move forward. Sun Chunlan, vice premier and head of Covid, announced last week that the country’s fitness formula had “withstood the test” of Covid-19 and that China was in a “new situation”.
After years of telling its citizens that the only way to stay away from covid was to avoid it altogether, the political pivot required a new message. Beijing opted to offer the dominant variant of Omicron as a less fatal edition of the original disease.
Xi told European Council President Charles Michel that China could ease restrictions because Omicron is less harmful than the Delta variant, which was previously the usual maximum.
The problem, epidemiologists warn, is that Beijing’s stance mirrors studies on Omicron’s impact, and the country is unprepared for a wave of fatal covid infections it could soon face.
“China has to find a way out. So I think it’s very helpful for them to say that the virus has evolved in a way that makes it less difficult to open up,” said Linda Bauld, a professor of public fitness at the University of Edinburgh.
“With Omicron, based on studies [so far], there would possibly be a small relief in disease severity, but not huge. “
Omicron proved less fatal because it spread to countries like Britain, but during the time it dominated, about 95 percent of the British population had some sort of antibody from previous vaccines or infections, Bauld said.
China has low vaccination and booster rates, especially among vulnerable seniors: only 40% of those over 80 have received boosters. Almost no one has herbal antibodies from past infections.
China’s healthcare formula is weak and asymmetrical even before the pandemic and has been plagued by years of fighting Covid.
Doctors and hospitals were defeated in 2020 when the disease ravaged the city of Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic and the grim scenes of those early days could be repeated if the virus wipes out an unprotected population.
A spring outbreak in Hong Kong, which has a much more powerful fitness system, offers a grim prediction of what China might face if it mismanages its opening.
“There have been a lot of deaths in Hong Kong, despite a small outbreak,” said Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene.
“While knowledge recommends that Omicron is much less severe than Delta, we have noted in Hong Kong how fatal Omicron can be where there is no history of exposure [infections] and limited vaccinations in vulnerable teams such as the elderly. “
In the largely unvaccinated elderly population, death rates were similar to those in the UK in the first wave of the pandemic, Julian Tang, a clinical virologist at the University of Leicester, told the British Medical Journal in March.
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The Chinese government has introduced a vaccination crusade aimed at older citizens, but China only uses locally developed vaccines, which are less opposed to covid than Western alternatives.
So far, Beijing has refused to import foreign-made vaccines. Instead, it is pushing for access to the technology, while national labs are looking for mRNA vaccines made through Pfizer and Moderna, but have been unsuccessful with either effort.
Joe Biden’s director of vaccines, Ashish Jha, warned last week that Beijing’s vaccines have “better quality” to control the virus. Without them, China risks falling into the cycles of harmful outbreaks and strict controls that many other countries experienced in 2020 and 2021.
“We have noticed countless cases in recent years where social resistance has led governments to withdraw measures before there is significant immunity in the population. The result has been an unsustainable accumulation of infections that jeopardizes the health care formula and then demands an era of longer, more serious restrictions,” said Thomas Hale, associate professor of global public policy at Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government.
“So far, China has moved away from this ‘roller coaster’ model, but recent adjustments suggest it may not be so fortunate in the future. “
How China handles the bumpy road of isolation will be done by the rest of the world. The fortunes of a global economy already battered in recent years by shocks such as the pandemic and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine are potentially at stake. For the first time in more than 3 decades, China’s economy will grow at a slower rate than its neighbors, the World Bank has forecasted. Its role as a global factory means more lockdowns would lead to disruptions around the world, adding important medical supplies.
There may also be implications for fitness. China’s easing of restrictions has been welcomed by the World Health Organization, but its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, also warned of the dangers of new variants emerging in any significant population other than through vaccination.
“The gaps in matrix tests . . . and vaccination continue to create ideal situations for the emergence of a new variant of fear that can lead to significant mortality,” Tedros said Friday.
Whatever the transition from 0 Covid to living with Covid, one facet of the coming months and years is for sure. Xi will try to take credit for any good fortune and eliminate or reject duty for any failure.
The Communist Party’s corporate control over Chinese media has allowed Xi to present his abrupt change last week as a victory, rather than a surprising and unforeseen reaction to the additional courage of citizens.
The protests have shown how many other people in China will escape censorship and are willing to threaten punishment from an authoritarian state, but have not been reported inside the country.
“I don’t know if there is necessarily a massive political challenge to Xi and the party in terms of [messages] because they still hold the national narrative very well,” said Professor Rana Mitter, director of Oxford University’s China Centre.
“The narrative they’re pushing is that they can now replace management, because the first [of the Covid checks] has been a success. “