China has given its most significant signal yet that it may adjust its stringent zero-Covid policy that has transformed daily life, roiled the economy — and sparked a wave of protests.
The top official in charge of China’s Covid response told health officials Wednesday that the country faced a “new stage and mission” in pandemic controls.
“With the decreasing toxicity of the Omicron variant, the increasing vaccination rate and the accumulating experience of outbreak control and prevention, China’s pandemic containment faces a new stage and mission,” Vice Premier Sun Chunlan said Wednesday, according to state news agency Xinhua.
The remarks follow a surge in public frustration with zero-Covid and its high human cost, which erupted into unprecedented demonstrations in at least 19 cities since last Friday.
Sun — who has been the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s enforcement of the policy — made no mention of “zero-Covid,” as reported by Xinhua. Her comments came a day after a separate body of top health officials pledged to rectify some approaches to Covid control and said local governments should “respond to and resolve the reasonable demands of the masses” in a timely manner.
On Thursday, Sun reiterated the new tone, telling a health symposium in Beijing that China’s health care and disease control systems now had “effective diagnosis and treatment techniques” against the epidemic. Overall, China had “created conditions for the country to further optimize its prevention and control measures,” she said, according to state media.
The high-level statements — alongside minor adjustments of rules and some easing of lockdown measures in major cities in recent days — suggest China is bending under pressure on the policy, which has become increasingly disruptive as it struggles to counter highly transmissible variants and record case numbers.
But the shifting tone has not come with any road map to an end goal or mention of transitioning away from zero-Covid, and as of Friday, thousands of buildings and residential communities across China remain under lockdown restrictions due to their classification as “high risk.”
It also remains uncertain how these signs will ease mounting public frustration or impact realities on the ground — where Chinese experts have maintained the country is underprepared for a major outbreak.
Tone shift
Chinese health officials and experts have long argued that the costs of the zero-Covid policy are scientifically justified, citing uncertainties in how the virus will evolve, unknowns about its long-term effects, and gaps in medical preparedness, including a lagging elderly vaccination rate and inadequate intensive care infrastructure, especially in rural areas.
These weaknesses, they have warned, could see the health care system overwhelmed if the virus spreads freely in the country of 1.4 billion — a situation that could exacerbate the deaths expected with an opening up.
This remains a key concern for the government, according to health security expert Nicholas Thomas at the City University of Hong Kong, who said: “An unmanaged engagement with the virus could not only erode [public] trust but it could also expose vulnerable populations [to risk].”
Officials’ recent comments are “not a sign that China is ready to transition to living with Covid, but a sign that the virus has slipped out of control and that the government is unable to return to a zero-Covid environment,” he said.
Case numbers in the past week have hovered around record highs, with more than 34,000 new infections reported Thursday — posing a steep challenge to efforts to return them to a low level.
There have, however, been recent signs of efforts to shift public perception of the virus, following years of focus on its risks.
A number of media outlets picked up a piece by state-run Global Times citing “recent research” from Chinese scientists showing the comparative “decreased pathogenicity” of the Omicron variant. A related hashtag was trending on China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo on Thursday.
Such coverage is a sharp divergence from recent years, when Chinese officials and leader Xi Jinping have touted China’s measures as a triumph of Chinese governance and a necessity to keep the public safe. The first year of the pandemic saw China remain relatively virus-free following the initial outbreak in Wuhan, as much of the rest of the world faced high numbers of infections and deaths.
Even as the highly contagious Omicron variant made China’s controls more disruptive and other countries transitioned to living with the virus following mass vaccination, Beijing continued to prioritize resources for lockdowns, mass testing and forced quarantines over preparing to exit the policy, observers say.
“The number one [reason] is propaganda — they want to claim that China is doing a much better job than the United States,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
He added that expanding state control over the population — a key policy goal of Xi — could be another motivation for maintaining the zero-Covid policy.
While pursuing this strategy, China “lost so many golden opportunities,” to prepare to live with the virus, and to prepare the public for a larger scale of deaths from Covid-19, he said.
Prepared?
One concern among health officials about relaxing controls is the low level of vaccination in the elderly population most vulnerable to Covid-19 — a weakness that Beijing on Tuesday launched a new plan to address.
As of November 11, 40% of China’s over-80 population had received a booster shot, according to state media, while around two-thirds had received two doses. A World Health Organization advisory group last year recommended that elderly people taking China’s inactivated-virus vaccines receive three doses in their initial course to ensure sufficient protection. Vaccine protection is also known to wane over time and decrease against Omicron.
China’s immunity rests almost entirely on vaccination as so few people have been exposed to the virus. Studies show China’s vaccines offer lower antibody protection than the mRNA vaccines used widely elsewhere in the world, which Beijing has yet to approve.
However, China has now signaled a new emphasis on bolstering its defenses against the virus.
Officials on Tuesday released an action plan to boost elderly vaccination rates. It followed a 20-point plan to optimize zero-Covid measures, released last month, which called for hospitals to increase intensive treatment facilities and stockpile anti-viral drugs and medical equipment.
The same notice also relaxed certain measures around testing and quarantine, and cautioned against excesses in policy enforcement at the local level — all messages that have been echoed by top health officials in recent days.
What’s next?
Following that guidance — and in the wake of the recent protests — a number of cities have made revisions to their policies, largely around testing and quarantine rules, while some have relaxed lockdown measures.
On Wednesday, officials in the southern hub of Guangzhou relaxed lockdowns in four districts and eased a quarantine requirement. And in Xinjiang’s Urumqi on Saturday, local officials said they would gradually ease lockdown measures in neighborhoods categorized as “low risk” and moved to reopen essential businesses and public transport in a notice the following day.
The protests across the nation were sparked by a deadly fire on November 24 in Urumqi, where at least 10 people died, and videos of the incident appeared to show lockdown measures had delayed firefighters from reaching the victims. They joined a list of deaths that have been widely linked in public conversation to Covid-19 controls.
But experts say the real test of the country’s direction remains to be seen in the coming months.
If the vaccination push and other proposed measures bolstering medical readiness were “seriously implemented,” then China would have “a way forward for future opening,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “But so far they have not been prioritized in the implementation process.”
Another question is how a shifting tone in Beijing is implemented by local government officials, who have faced punishment in the past for outbreaks in their regions.
“You have to change the incentive structure of the local governments before any meaningful changes can be introduced,” Huang said.
CNN’s Wayne Chang, Xiaofei Xu and Mengchen Zhang contributed reporting.
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