7, even as the bodies pile up in crematoriums and fever clinics. China maintains that there have only been seven deaths since the zero-COVID policy effectively ended on Dec. The withdrawal of the onerous testing system has moved China from one extreme to another, with citizens forming social media groups to work together to find testing kits which are suddenly in short supply. The official figures are an increasingly ludicrous fiction. Reliable numbers are impossible to obtain. Overconfidence and over-investment in zero-COVID measures, combined with political demands and propaganda, have left health care workers uncertain as to what to do and the Chinese public dangerously vulnerable. The years of the pandemic were spent shoring up zero-COVID controls to extremes, not expanding the health care system. These countries escaped the extremely high infection rates of the first year of the pandemic in countries such as the United States despite omicron waves, putting their decision-making in stark contrast to China’s.Ĭhina’s comparative success or failure won’t be clear for years, if ever, but the picture on the ground so far ranges from disappointing to frightening. Other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, abandoned strict containment policies but were able to contain hospitalizations and deaths because they had used the time they bought for themselves to vaccinate their citizens, educate their publics, and build up health care supply chains. Streets once empty because of lockdowns are now empty because people are only venturing out to get medicine. The COVID-19 wave now surging across the country is hitting a deeply underprepared health care system. But Beijing hasn’t used that time wisely. The central city of Zhengzhou, where workers at the massive Foxconn (2317.TW) factory that makes iPhones for Apple Inc (AAPL.O) staged protests, announced five days of mass testing in eight districts, becoming the latest to revive daily tests for millions of residents.Ī sharper than expected slowdown in China, which is hurting domestic demand in particular, would reverberate across countries including Japan, South Korea and Australia, which export hundreds of billions of dollars worth of products and commodities to the world's second largest economy.Since successfully containing the first Wuhan outbreak in April 2020, China has had more than two and a half years to prepare for the end of its zero-COVID policy, which placed strict restrictions on a public increasingly tired of life under lockdowns. Others, including Beijing, Shanghai and the Hainan island resort city of Sanya, have limited movements of recent arrivals. Many cities have returned to mass testing, which China had hoped to cut back as costs rise. The far northeastern city of Harbin announced lockdowns of some areas on Thursday. Many people in Beijing said they recently received notices about three-day lockdowns of their housing compounds. Instead, cities have been using more localised and often unannounced lockdowns. While official case tallies are low by global standards, China tries to stamp out every infection chain, a tougher challenge as China faces its first winter battling the highly contagious Omicron variant.Ĭhina recently began loosening some norms on mass tests and quarantine, as it looks to avoid catch-all measures such as city-wide lockdowns. "Shanghai-style full lockdowns could be avoided, but they might be replaced by more frequent partial lockdowns in a rising number of cities due to surging COVID case numbers," its analysts wrote. Nomura estimates that more than a fifth of China's GDP is under lockdown, a share bigger than the British economy. This time, however, big outbreaks are numerous and far-flung, with the biggest in the southern city of Guangzhou and southwestern Chongqing, although hundreds of new infections are reported daily in cities such as Chengdu, Jinan, Lanzhou and Xian. Wednesday's 31,444 new local COVID-19 infections broke a record set on April 13, when the commercial hub of Shanghai was crippled by a city-wide lockdown of its 25 million residents that would last two months. REUTERS/Thomas Peter WIDESPREAD OUTBREAKS, LOCKDOWNS Epidemic prevention workers in protective suits sit in a locked-down residential compound as outbreaks of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continue in Beijing, November 23, 2022.
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