Why is China’s zero Covid strategy not working?
Lockdowns, mass testing, restrictions and, consequently, an economic slowdown. For nearly three years, China's zero Covid strategy has been crippling a country of 1.4 billion people, yet this week saw the highest number of daily cases since the start of the pandemic. How is it possible?
Just a week ago, newspapers announced a tentative easing of the strict restrictive measures set out in China's zero Covid strategy and local headlines were starting to rise again.
Then videos appeared of workers at Foxconn, the country's main iPhone manufacturer , protesting and rebelling – not an irrelevant detail in a state where dissent is stifled in the bud – precisely because of the harsh restrictions imposed by Beijing. Restrictions that have practically held hundreds of thousands of factory workers hostage since October, forced to live in dormitories built specifically to keep the infections that have spread in the company under control.
Now, the news that on Wednesday China recorded the highest number of daily cases since the beginning of the pandemic, despite the zero Covid strategy aimed at eliminating the virus. A fact that raises doubts both on the effectiveness of this policy and on the country's prospects for economic growth.
THE DATA
Last Wednesday, according to data reported by the BBC , China recorded a new record of infections caused by Covid: 31,527 against the peak of 28,000 in April.
Numbers that in reality, observes the British newspaper, are "still small for a country of 1.4 billion people" which, officially, has declared that just over 5,200 people have died since the beginning of the pandemic.
Figure that has nothing to do with the data, for example, of the United States or other Western countries that have not applied the same measures. This equates, in fact, to 3 deaths from Covid per million, compared to 3,000 per million in the US and 2,400 per million in the UK.
But despite this, Beijing's response has not changed and zero tolerance continues to impose lockdowns, mass tests, closures and new restrictions. In Zhengzhou, the Chinese city of iPhones where protests have broken out, the lockdown will affect 6 million people.
THE HUMAN COST OF THE ZERO COVID STRATEGY AND THE PROTESTS
But Beijing also has another problem in addition to infections. In fact, in the country where you can't protest, demonstrations of dissent caused by the "side effects" of the zero Covid strategy are growing more and more.
In addition to the recent Foxconn case, the BBC recalls when in January, in the tourist city of Xi'an, which has 13 million inhabitants, some residents were forced from their homes in a midnight eviction and were transported to buses to quarantine facilities, from where complaints about the conditions in which patients are treated have followed.
One of the best known is that of the family of a 16-year-old girl who died in one of these centers in October after requests for medical assistance were ignored, while last week the news was released of the death of a baby girl from Zhengzhou because the treatments had been delayed precisely by the restrictions.
WHY IS THE ZERO COVID STRATEGY NOT WORKING?
So how is it possible that all these checks and restrictions are not enough to contain the infections? As stated by various scientists quoted by the BBC and CNN , in addition to not having sufficient resources allocated to the expansion of medical facilities to cope with the massive influx of patients, the real problem – whatever those who believe that there is no evidence without vaccines it might have been worse – it lies precisely in the fact that vaccination rates in China are too low, especially among vulnerable groups.
The Dragon, which has failed to develop a new generation mRna vaccine and has not even wanted to import them, now has to deal with a population in which only half of the people over 80 have received the primary vaccination.
A HUGE BLOW FOR THE ECONOMY TOO
But while on the one hand the Chinese policy has apparently saved lives, despite the very high price that the population is paying, in addition to the human cost this strategy also has a high economic cost.
In fact, investors are increasingly worried and distrustful about Beijing's approach to the pandemic almost three years after the outbreak and also about the fact that Xi may sacrifice economic growth in favor of ideology – as reiterated at the last party congress Chinese Communist Party (CPC) who handed him a third mandate.
Brokerage firm Nomura cut both its annualized forecasts for China's fourth-quarter GDP from 2.8% to 2.4% and its full-year 2022 growth forecast from 2.9% to 2. .8%, a far cry from China's official target of around 5.5%.
“We believe reopening is likely to be a protracted process with high costs,” wrote Nomura, who also lowered his forecast for China's GDP growth next year from 4.3% to 4.0%.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/perche-la-strategia-zero-covid-della-cina-non-sta-funzionando/ on Fri, 25 Nov 2022 11:26:48 +0000.