Beijing’s Zero Covid experiment has ended in catastrophic failure.
In 2020, China was where the world’s Covid lockdowns began – today, they are finally ending there, too. Until recently, China had seemed committed to its draconian Zero Covid approach. In October, President Xi Jinping assured the Chinese Communist Party Congress: ‘We have adhered to the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life, adhered to dynamic Zero Covid, and achieved major positive results in the overall prevention and control of the epidemic, and economic and social development.’
Now it’s finally over. China’s testing booths are being dismantled. In Beijing you will no longer need to show a negative PCR test on your smartphone to enter the supermarket, catch the bus or exercise in the park. In Shandong province you won’t need one to buy cough drops – once a marker of suspicion that your family might have Covid. Those who do catch Covid may be allowed to self-isolate at home instead of being carted to the quarantine centre. It’s unclear how complete the relaxation will be. But what is now certain is that the viral genie cannot be squeezed back into its bottle.
Perhaps the anti-lockdown protests of the past few weeks triggered this shift. More likely the rules were simply becoming unsustainable. People were finding ways to evade them. And the costs of maintaining them were bankrupting China’s cities. By late October, 28 cities and over 200million people were under lockdown, in regions representing $3.55 trillion of China’s GDP. Cases nonetheless were drifting up, with record numbers recorded in early November. It is possible that a post-congress pivot was always intended, and protests were tolerated, to a degree, to provide cover.
The CCP’s ostensible justification for the climbdown is that the Omicron variant causes milder disease than earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants. This is like saying that water is wet. Omicron’s mildness was recognised a year ago by Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who discovered it. This was accepted by JP Morgan’s actuaries, whose modelling was relied on by then UK chancellor Rishi Sunak and others in cabinet to help prevent the lockdown that had been threatened by PM Boris Johnson and the UK’s scientific advisers last Christmas. SAGE, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance and Co had initially denied that Omicron was mild but soon conceded the point.
After that winter, Western countries started to open up and shed their restrictions. By March 2022, Iceland was one of multiple European countries to have abandoned all non-pharmaceutical interventions. Its chief epidemiologist, Thorolfur Gudnason, advised the government at the time that ‘as many people as possible need to be infected with the [Omicron] virus, because vaccines alone are not enough’. As spring advanced, China’s fellow Zero Covid holdouts – New Zealand, Australia, Korea and Taiwan – folded one by one.
By summer, Beijing stood alone. Now, it too has recognised virological reality. This has major implications not only in China, but also for public-health policy worldwide.
China first.
