Beijing will win the gold medal for lockdowns.
China’s zero-Covid policy of lockdowns and quarantines has been so strict that the country’s president, Xi Jinping, hasn’t left the country in about two years. Now that the highly transmissible omicron variant has been reported in China, what will it mean for the Olympics — and for us? One thing is certain: With the Beijing Olympics a little more than a month away and the politically significant National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party to be held in the fall, the harsh localized lockdowns that have defined China’s response to the pandemic are likely to persist throughout 2022, maybe even longer. China’s policy is basically the polar opposite of how the US has been trying to live with the virus. Any positive case is quarantined. Contact tracing, enabled through surveillance tech and artificial intelligence, can pinpoint a flare-up: Buildings, city blocks, or even whole neighborhoods are sealed when a case is reported. “It’s pretty brutal. It’s a blunt tool,” said Megan Greene, an economist with the Kroll Institute. Yet as a result of the policy, China has had many, many fewer deaths. But zero Covid is going to be much more difficult to implement with a more transmissible variant, and the lessened effectiveness of Chinese vaccines against variants suggests that this policy will only be hardened. (To be fair, two doses of the mRNA vaccines aren’t doing great in preventing omicron infection, according to initial studies, although they still offer strong protection against severe illness.) “On the surface, [the spread of the new variant] seems to have vindicated that approach,” said public health expert Yanzhong Huang of Seton Hall University. “They seem to be confident with the existing approach and strict implementation.” And that existing approach had an effect on markets and supply chains, and now it’s likely to do that again. Just a few cases of omicron have appeared in China so far. One infected person in a southern city bordering on Vietnam has caused 200,000 people to go into lockdown and the city of 13 million to be shut down, according to the Washington Post. With the Lunar New Year approaching, experts say even more precautionary measures, such as travel bans, may come next. The country’s leadership will now face a major public health headache as the omicron variant collides with the Beijing Olympics.
