Shanghai’s massive quarantine hospitals have not been shuttered. The Covid-19 cases in Shanghai have been wrestled to the ground, for now, but many fear this progress will not hold and the government will be required to reach for ever more extreme measures. In March, an estimated 345 million people across 46 cities were in full or partial lockdowns, a population accounting for 40 percent of GDP. Chasing the virus has in effect meant rolling closures across much of China. Outbreaks spread subsequently across many other major urban centers, including Beijing. A confirmed half million cases were counted in Shanghai between March and late May. Today, Omicron subvariant infections often outstrip China’s controls. Two years post-Wuhan, however, the ground has shifted, and the challenges have become far more complicated. From the Chinese leadership’s perspective, Hong Kong’s exceptionally high death rate in the spring provides stark proof of that possible scenario. So much of China’s population is immunologically naïve that the losses might exceed a million deaths if China reopens before proper protective measures have been introduced. By contrast with the West, where populations have acquired, at least temporarily, a wall of immunity through infection and vaccinations and where life is returning to some level of pre-pandemic normality, China’s leadership argues it simply cannot afford at present to shift course and reopen. To China’s leadership, this transition is proof that Zero-Covid has succeeded, again. Jumping ahead to 2022, after 60 days of lockdown this spring, Shanghai nervously reopened on June 1, with a mere 29 cases reported the day before, down from a peak of more than 26,000 per day in April. (This figure is likely a woeful undercount, but even if wrong by tenfold, it remains modest for a population of 1.4 billion and a fraction of U.S. One million Americans had officially died from Covid-19 by May 2022, at which point China reported a mere 5,200 fatalities. Denial, delays, incompetence, and polarization left over 360,000 Americans dead by the end of 2020. It was a dramatic, forceful demonstration of Chinese might and resolve, in stark contrast to what was seen in the United States and other wealthy Western states. Though brutal, it is credited with holding the Covid-19 virus at bay during 20, keeping excess deaths to remarkably low levels, and restoring China’s economic growth following an almost 7 percent, precipitous drop in GDP. China’s Zero-Covid approach in the aftermath of the Wuhan outbreak of early 2020 rested on a 76-day mass lockdown, mass testing, intense surveillance, isolation, quarantines, and border closures.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |