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Topic: China May Move beyond Zero-Covid

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China May Move beyond Zero-Covid
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Recently many experts have spotlighted China’s acute vulnerability in the face of Omicron and predicted the virus may soon overrun the fearsome defenses of China’s Zero-Covid policy, infecting millions of weakly protected Chinese, in particular a massive elderly population with little immune protection, who in turn could swamp China’s poorly prepared, under-resourced health system.To get more news about covid cases in shanghai , you can visit shine news official website.

Such a nightmare may or may not materialize. In the meantime, more careful consideration—and a measure of humility and caution—should be front and center. We need to weigh what we know and the many key things we do not know, the different scenarios that might arise, and the tools at China’s disposal. We also need to consider the possibility that Omicron, unleashed in China, might actually favor a constructive reset in China’s outlook in its quest for mass-scale mRNA vaccines and antivirals, including a shift in outlook toward the United States and others in the Western world, made even more urgent by the reality that China’s own mRNA vaccine candidates are still far away in their development and of unproven quality. China will inevitably move beyond Zero-Covid, a patently unsustainable approach that makes less and less sense as effective treatments arrive and immune protections from vaccines and infection rise elsewhere in the world. The only question is how orderly and at what price this transition to a new long-term strategy will occur. To navigate successfully, this change will require tough decisions, leadership, skill, and luck, while the exact path may remain murky for some time. China will likely avoid disaster, but there are difficult adjustments that, if executed successfully, may improve prospects for mitigating the worst effects of the virus.

The Temporary Logic of Zero-Covid
China’s Zero-Covid approach presumes an unending emergency and relies on severely restricted international travel, mass testing and quarantines, exceptionally intrusive technological and human surveillance, and brutal large-scale lockdowns. Until recently, the fierce Chinese state has successfully controlled infections and deaths. It is clear that some of these steps are beyond what is necessary, for example, testing or shutting in their homes millions of people in the wake of a handful of cases, but local officials are responding to Covid-19 with the same vigor with which they used to pursue the one-child policy and keep generating economic growth. So even while disrupting the economy and society at large—creating anxiety and frustration over the risk of suddenly getting swept into protracted isolation—the Zero-Covid policy also seems to have retained broad public support in China.

But Zero-Covid may have met its match in Omicron if the variant’s extraordinary transmissibility and ability to escape immune protections pierce China’s stringent controls, mirroring the patterns seen in Europe and North America. By this reasoning, Omicron stands poised to exploit China’s enormous “immunity gap.” China’s population has almost no protection acquired through infection (thought to be less than 1 percent of the population) and very low protections against infection acquired from Chinese vaccines, which have proven significantly inferior to Western mRNA vaccines. China’s vulnerability is further compounded by two other conspicuous vacant spaces in the toolbox: the lack of timely access to both mRNA vaccines (including third shot boosters to partly cover the immunity gap) and antivirals on a scale that will make a difference in the near to medium term.

China’s immunity gap is a serious, glaring problem today. It could become even starker when the virus becomes endemic in much of the rest of the world, as the emergency pandemic phase transitions to the management of a seasonal virus against which most populations elsewhere have built up considerable immune protections.

Without mRNA vaccines or antivirals ready at hand, imagining what playbook might replace China’s Zero-Covid policy is a puzzle. Not surprisingly, the signs thus far are that China’s rulers are for sticking to what they know best, for better or worse. As more outbreaks occur across China, along coastal areas, in the interior, and now near Beijing, the reflex has been to double down on stringent controls. Over 20 million people recently have been placed in lockdown across three megacities (Xi’an, Tianjin, and Shenzhen). Meanwhile, the government has suspended international flights and reinforced media campaigns that exaggerate the threat of Omicron.
Unanswered Questions
There are, however, several unknowns in the China equation which argue for humility and caution in predicting what may ultimately transpire in China.

We do not really know what level of protection the Chinese vaccines confer against Delta and Omicron in terms of hospitalizations and death. The available evidence is quite murky. We also do not have a very good understanding of the resilience of China’s health system and the speed with which it is currently being fortified. Nor do we know how effective China’s brutal isolation of populations at risk will be in containing Omicron. Each of these factors is critical in reaching an accurate estimate of China’s true vulnerability.

We also do not have much insight into how Chinese public opinion is evolving at this moment in time. It was thought that the majority of those in urban settings and who enjoy more settled, secure economic status have bought into the deal that President Xi Jinping has tabled: freedom from the virus and a relatively normal, virus-free life gained through collective discipline and sacrifice. However, that compact has been severely tested in Xi’an and other urban centers forced into extended lockdowns, where dissent has been loud and resonated nationally and globally. For China’s 300 million migrant laborers, the constant disruptions, and the inability to travel home reliably over the Lunar New Year, likely carry a psychic toll and may already be fueling discontent.

We also do not know President Xi’s state of mind. Thus far, the daily count of domestic transmissions remains extremely low, and there seem to be few cases and little to no spread of Covid cases inside the Olympic “closed-loop” system. China’s success in containing the spread of Omicron during the Olympics may encourage the choice to sustain Zero-Covid until after the 20th Party Congress in late 2022. Indeed, the leadup to the Congress is the test of whether Xi entrenches his near total powers in a third five-year term, and his success hangs to a profound degree upon the management of the pandemic. Moreover, he has discovered that expanded pandemic controls bring greater political control and reinforce strategic directions he favors including increased economic self-reliance and greater flexibility in modulating the extent of its ties with other countries. Zero-Covid may also provide proof of concept for a “surveillance state” that aspires to control every facet of behavior in the post-pandemic era. It probably seems politically inadvisable in 2022 to pivot away in the near term from Zero-Covid, with all the risks of losing control that might imply. But then again, Zero-Covid imposes a not insignificant economic price, and the Xi’an debacle has cut into public support. Omicron may begin to override controls and vaccine immunity protections, as it has in many settings in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, where over 1.6 billion Chinese vaccines have been administered. These realities are not lost on Xi, who may already be recalculating the risks and weighing a pivot post-Olympics.



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