CHINAs ZERO COVID POLICY

1. Context 

2. Key Points

• Scary pictures and videos of crowded hospital beds and piled-up bodies have appeared on social media, even though they remain unverified so far.
• The widespread wave of new coronavirus cases and quoted unnamed relatives of victims and people in the funeral business as saying deaths linked to Covid-19 were increasing.
• Before Monday's two reported deaths both in Beijing China had not reported any deaths since December 4.

3. China's official data

• The official picture is very different, though. Officially, China's National Health Commission has put the total number of Covid deaths in the country since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020 at 5,237 and the number of confirmed cases of the disease at 3, 80, 453.
• These numbers are a small fraction of those in other countries, including the United States and India and are also questionable.

4. Our World Data 

• According to numbers compiled by Our World in Data, cumulative case numbers in China from the beginning of the Pandemic are 1.9 million.
• Cases spiked sharply in late November and in one 24-hour period crossed 40, 000 new infections for the first time, beating a record achieved in April 2022.
• However, they fell equally sharply soon and were at 2, 819 on December 19, less than the 3, 417 on December 18 and 4, 656 on December 17. (7-day rolling average from Our World in Data).

5. China Strategy 

• China is different from the rest of the world mainly because of the extremely restrictive containment strategy it has adopted, with a fair degree of success.
• And the new wave of infections has come within days of China dropping suddenly and without explanation almost all the restrictions of its zero-Covid policy.
• International observers have pointed to a wave of protests against the restrictions and aggressive testing that preceded the dropping of zero-Covid.
• Some extraordinary protests called for even the resignation of supreme leader Xi Jinping and some observers said the scenes on the streets and several university campuses were reminiscent of the Tiananmen Square protests.

6. Zero-Covid Policy

• While most countries have concentrated on not allowing infections to go out of control while allowing normal activities to continue, china has pursued a zero covid strategy from the beginning.
• Every known case, even asymptomatic, was mandatory hospitalised, small outbreaks triggered hard lockdowns and suspected cases and all contacts were kept under long isolation.
• The financial capital of Shanghai, home to more than 25 million people was entirely locked down in March.
• In effect, the Chinese strategy has been to smash the virus with a blunt instrument and make it incapable of causing damage by putting people behind an iron curtain of restrictions.
• Though painful, the strategy was largely successful. It helped that China is an authoritarian country where measures that would be unthinkable in democracies can be implemented with success.
• This very success is now turning out to be a weakness. The vast majority of China's population has not been infected by the virus and hence has no immunity. Vaccines are not known to prevent infection in very significant ways.
• Thus, when a fast-spreading variant like Omicron does manage to break through the strong defences of the Zero-Covid strategy, as it sometimes will, it encounters a vast pool of susceptible people.
• The virus can spread very rapidly after that. This is what happened in March-April and this is what seems to be happening now.

7. Hong Kong and South Korea zero-Covid policy 

• A similar scenario played out in Hong Kong and South Korea in February.

• But when Omicron finally broke through, both countries saw thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths every day.
• China faces a similar danger for the second time this year.
• Omicron causes milder disease compared to Delta or Beta, but it can still lead to deaths among the elderly population.

8. Vaccinations 

• China has administered almost 3.5 billion doses of vaccines, but the penetration among the 80-plus population has been low.
• In addition, there have been questioning marks over the effectiveness of the two Chinese vaccines in use, Sinovac and Sinopharm.
• Like most of China's data, there is uncertainty over the number of booster shots that have been administered.
• Vaccines become increasingly less effective over time and in the absence of both a booster as well as natural immunity, the population becomes extremely vulnerable.
• In India, the Omicron wave of the winter of 2021-22 hit when a very large number of people were already double-jabbed, but the variant got through those immune defences and succeeded in making people sick.

For Prelims & Mains