As the highly contagious variant pushes leaders in the United States, Australia and elsewhere to renew restrictions, President Xi Jinping’s government is fighting the most serious outbreak since last year’s peak in Wuhan. The Communist Party’s ruling party is trying to revive the tactics that closed down China. Access to 1.5 million people in a city has been blocked, flights cancelled and mass testing was ordered in certain areas.
The “zero tolerance” strategy, which quarantines every case and attempts to prevent new infections from overseas, helped contain the virus outbreak last year and has kept China relatively virus-free. However, the virus’s impact on the lives of millions of people is causing alarm. China must learn how to manage the virus without shutting down society and the economy.
Zhang Wenhong is a prominent Shanghai doctor who was famous during the Wuhan epidemic. He suggested that China’s strategy might change in a post on social media. He said that “we will definitely learn more” about the current outbreak and called it a stress test.
Zhang wrote, “The world must learn to coexist with the virus.” He has over 3 million followers on Sina Weibo.
China’s control mechanisms will be put to the test when thousands of journalists, athletes and other visitors arrive in Beijing for the Winter Olympics. The ruling party will face a politically sensitive leadership change in the latter part of 2022. Leaders want positive economic conditions.
China closed down a large portion of the second-largest economy in the world and blocked access to 60 million people. This was a similar tactic used by other countries from Asia to Americas. China suffered its worst economic contraction in 50 years, but Beijing was able allow domestic and business travel to resume in March 2020.
Global financial markets have been shaken by the new infections. Many of these are in people who have been vaccinated. Stock indexes in Shanghai and Hong Kong fell Tuesday, but rose again on Thursday.
Xi Chen, a Yale School of Public Health health economist, stated that China must create barriers to infection in communities by increasing vaccinations, quickly treating infected persons, and allowing for business and travel. He stated that the country should have access to all vaccines, including the BioNTech shot.
Chen stated that Chen doesn’t believe “zero tolerance” can be sustained. “Even if all regions of China are locked down, it is possible for people to still die. More might be killed due to hunger and loss of work.”
Beijing is not showing any signs of abandoning its tactics.
He Qinghua, a senior official at the National Health Commission’s Disease Control Bureau said that disease controls must be “faster, more firm and stricter,” during a Saturday news conference.
According to health officials, the biggest strain of the year’s outbreak can be tentatively attributed to airport workers who cleaned a Russian aircraft on July 10, in Nanjing. It is located northwest of Shanghai in Jiangsu.
Many travelers flew from Nanjing to Zhangjiajie in China, making that city a hub for the spread of the virus. The disease spread to Beijing and other cities in over 10 provinces.
The government of Zhangjiajie declared Tuesday that no one could leave the city. This was in imitation of the controls placed on Wuhan last year, which saw the first cases of the virus being identified.
The suspension of flights to Nanjing, Yangzhou and another nearby city with 94 cases was due to the severity of the situation. These cities, along with 21 other to Beijing, were affected by the suspension of trains. To test drivers, Jiangsu set up highway checkpoints. People in Beijing and Guangdong were asked to stay put.
According to Zhou Xiaoxiao (a student at the university), two Yangzhou tutoring centers had their children quarantined following a positive test. She claimed that some areas of the city were sealed.
Zhou stated that eggs and other foods were scarce because shoppers had cleared out supermarkets ahead of a lockdown. Zhou said that rice was being delivered by the government to households.
“The vegetable prices have risen. This is nothing to me. It’s very troubling for the family with no income and a life that is not very comfortable,” Zhou, 20, said.
These 1,142 infections, many of them linked to Nanjing are small compared to the tens of thousand of daily infections in India and the United States. They did however jolt leaders in China, which hadn’t seen a fatality in the first half of February.
The country’s victory in the epidemic battle poses serious challenges,” stated The Global Times, a newspaper published by the People’s Daily.
China has reported 4,636 deaths from approximately 93,000 cases.
The majority of those infected in Nanjing have been vaccinated and there are few severe cases, Yang Yi, head of the critical care unit at Southeastern University’s hospital, told The Paper.
She said that means “vaccines are protective” — though concerns remain that Chinese-made vaccines offer less protection than some others.
Officials blame Nanjing airport management and local officials who failed to enforce safety rules and detect infections during the 10 days preceding July 20, when the virus was spread.
Police announced Tuesday that a 64-year old woman was arrested on suspicion of hindering disease prevention.
According to news reports, cleaning staff at Nanjing’s new international terminal mixed with domestic workers when they should have been separate. Bad weather in Shanghai caused the Russian flight to be diverted. There are better airports for foreign travelers.
The city, home to 9.3 million people, is still the second largest in eastern China after Shanghai. It also has more resources that many smaller cities.
Chen, an economist, stated that China must learn to “allow the virus” to exist in areas with higher vaccination rates and better health care. Chen noted that at least 80% of adults have been vaccinated in some areas.
Chen said, “I don’t believe they are blind to it.” Chen said, “They should already think about it.”
