China’s long-Covid lingers on

In late 2019, a novel RNA virus emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan, ushering in a global pandemic. For much of the world, life has now reverted to something near normality. Yet three years on, China still can’t shake Covid-19.

The country recorded a record 31,527 cases on Wednesday – the highest daily tally since the pandemic began. Several major cities including the capital Beijing and southern trade hub Guangzhou are experiencing fresh outbreaks.

The numbers are still tiny for a country of 1.4bn people and officially just over 5,200 have died since the pandemic began.

Yet the price China is paying for this low death toll is enormous. Some 200m people are still living under restrictions across the country, and the zero-Covid policy at the top of the Chinese Communist Party remains in place.

President Xi Jinping did try to ease restrictions this month, ditching tracing of second-degree close contacts of confirmed positive cases and reducing quarantine periods.

But instead of easing the burden, the softening of approach has muddied the waters, with local officials unsure of just how stringent measures now need to be.

The resurgence of cases casts doubt on the prospect of a significant easing of restrictions any time soon. Confusion abounds, and there’s no clear exit plan.

One problem is that China has stubbornly refused to import vaccines manufactured outside its shores. The homegrown Sinovac jab is 51 per cent effective at preventing symptomatic infection, compared to Pfizer’s 95 per cent, and fades more quickly than Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines. While experts believe that three doses of the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines provide high levels of protection against severe illness and death, a third of China’s 267m people older than 60 have not received their third dose.

China’s ICU capacity is an added cause for concern. At 3.6 beds per 100,000 people, it’s lower than many Asian countries. Taiwan, incidentally, tops the Asian league table, with 28.5.

These weaknesses underpin the zealous embrace of tight controls, the economic drag of which has been staggering. Stop-start lockdowns have devastated domestic spending and are preventing any economic momentum from building. After a strong bounceback following the 2020 nosedive, China’s growth is sluggish – its GDP is set to grow by just 2 per cent this year, compared to 2.8 per cent in the US, and well under its 5 per cent target. 

But zero-Covid has extracted the heaviest toll of all from Chinese citizens. Midnight evictions and forced transportation to quarantine facilities still occur, most recently in the city of Xi’an, a tourist hub of 13m people. Lockdowns in Xinjiang and Tibet have lasted for months. That both regions contain restless minorities Beijing is determined to crush is no coincidence.

As protests this week at the Covid-hit iPhone factory in Zhengzhou showed, Xi Jinping has the problem of an increasingly fractious population to add to his economic woes.