The crisis of Wuhan, China, as revealed by Weibo: The public’s frustration with the government’s zero-Covid policy
Fighting back tears, she shouts abuse at the hazmat-suited workers below in a video that has recently gone viral on social media platform Weibo and which appears to encapsulate the Chinese public’s growing frustration with their government’s uncompromising zero-Covid policy.
The woman has been under doctor’s orders for a year since she returned from university. They stare back, seemingly unmoved.
And while experts say it’s possible economic and other considerations could see China loosen certain controls in the coming year, an eventual end to zero-Covid may not see an end to all of its vestiges – especially as Xi, including in his Sunday address, has made clear his focus on increasing “security” in China.
It comes even as the Communist Party Congress in Beijing on Sunday is expected to cement the position of the most powerful leader in decades and as the country is currently being affected by flare infections.
The meeting of the party will be watched by people across the world to see if there are signs of the party’s priorities when it comes to its zero- Covid stance.
It is difficult to know what level of public frustration really is due to the constant threat of being locked up for weeks, and the digital health codes that dictate where people can and cannot go. Meanwhile, the country’s economy is faltering, with both the IMF and World Bank recently downgrading China’s GDP growth forecasts, citing zero-Covid as one of the major drags.
In Wuhan, there was chaos. The city shut itself off from the outside world, while hospitals were overrun with the sick and dying – but it was too late to stop the virus’ advance. The country of China was locked down, forcing it to a halt. Online, public outrage over apparent delays in the official release of information – and the silencing of whistleblowers – lit up social media faster than the censors could repress it.
Numerous accounts on Weibo and WeChat, the super-app essential for daily life in China, have been banned after commenting on – or alluding to – the protest.
Still, many spoke out to express their support and awe. Some shared the Chinese pop hit of “Lonely Warrior” in a veiled reference to the protester, who they called a “hero,” while others swore never to forget.
Two Months of the Violation of the Xi Lockdown: State-level Results and Beijing’s Response to The Latest Outbreak
But, now, as Xi steps into an expected new era of his rule, that system – known today as the “dynamic zero-Covid” policy – is facing both social and economic pushback.
25 million people have already experienced two months of the world’s strictest lockdown and now residents are on edge as authorities begin to tighten measures once again.
One of the studies, posted as a preprint without peer review on 14 December, uses data from recent outbreaks in Hong Kong and Shanghai to compare different scenarios in China. If infections rise as quickly as they expected, hospitals will be overwhelmed. This will probably result in about one million deaths over the next few months, the study forecasts.
The Chinese government has dismantled many of the restrictions that it imposed to prevent the spread of the virus. The massscription of the entire city, as well as restrictions on travel within and between regions, have been lifted. Testing is now voluntary, and last week, the National Health Commission announced that it will stop reporting the number of infected people who have no symptoms.
Some people in the city have been reported to be drinking more water than they need due to the potential of unpredictable and unexplained snap lock downs.
panicking buying has gotten worse due to the announcement that the water AUTHORITIES IN SHANGHAI took action to ensure WATER QUALITY after discovering saltwater in the river during September.
The number of reported cases has dropped since late November due to changes in testing requirements, but there are indications that infections are rising in some areas. Beijing is facing a surge in infections according to the Chinese state media agency.
The country has also seen an uptick in cases in domestic tourist destinations, despite its strict curbs having discouraged people from traveling or spending over China’s Golden Week holiday in early October.
A deputy director of the regional Department of Education said that 240,000 university students have been locked down on campuses due to the latest outbreak. And the outbreak on campus has led to punitive action, with one university Communist Party boss being sacked after 39 students from his institution tested positive.
In western Xinjiang, more than 20 million people have been banned from leaving the region and are required to stay. There were many new cases recorded on Thursday.
Yet amid it all, Beijing appears unwilling to move from its hardline stance. For three days this week, the state-run Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily published commentaries reiterating that China would not let its guard down.
It insisted that the battle was winnable. Other countries that had reopened and eased restrictions had done so because they had no choice, it said, as they had failed to “effectively control the epidemic in a timely manner.”
“I think most people in rural China may have some misunderstandings about the virus, which may come from the overhyping of this virus by the state in the past two years. He supports the government’s treatment of Covid-19 during the Pandemic and says that it is one of the reasons why people are afraid.
Censored by Big Data: A Closer Look at a Chinese Communist Party Leader’s Internet Ecosystem at the Fourth CPNP Congress
China’s most powerful leader since the end of the Cultural Revolution is poised to cement his place as the leader of the Communist Party when he is nominated for a third term on Sunday.
As China’s Communist Party National Congress meets this week to approve the party’s priorities for the next five years, many are watching for signs restrictions could be loosened. Any change would need to come from the top and from the leader who has tried to extend, not curtail, the party’s control on daily life.
Consumers in China can shop, dine, and travel more easily, thanks to China’s advanced online ecosystem that runs on phones and codes. Now, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.
State control on people’s movements has never before been seen in China, as a result of the mobile phone health codes being the basis of a system designed to track citizens and designate whether they can enter various venues.
Basic activities such as going to the grocery store, riding public transport, or entering an office building depend on holding a negative Covid test and being free from close contact of a patient – data points reflected by a color code.
Going out in public can be a risk in itself, as being placed under quarantine or barricaded by authorities into a mall or office building as part of a snap lockdown could simply depend on whether someone in the general vicinity ends up testing positive.
“(You see) all the flaws of big data when it has control over your daily life,” said one Shanghai resident surnamed Li, who spent a recent afternoon scrambling to prove he didn’t need to quarantine after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location near to where a positive case had been detected.
When Li had not received a message, he contacted a hotline and explained the situation to his wife, who returned her health code to green.
What will we learn from the zero-Covid policy? A critical appraisal of the public’s reaction to Beijing’s late-night bus protest
“The essence of persisting with dynamic zero-Covid is putting people first and prioritizing life,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily – one of three along similar lines released by the party mouthpiece last week in an apparent bid to lower public expectation about any policy changes ahead of the Party Congress.
One comment, which got more than 250000 likes and was removed from the site, said, “What makes you think that you will not be on that late-night bus one day?”
There was a rare political protest last week in Beijing where banners hung from a bridge over the Third Ring Road, which is busy with traffic.
The impact of those controls has gotten more pronounced, as they have left people struggling for access to food and medicine and grappling with lost income and a mental toll.
In the run up to the Party Congress, authorities in the country beefed up controls to make sure there wasn’t any outbreak that would coincide with the major political event.
Ben Cowling, an Epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong said that the zero-Covid strategy is more expensive than it was one year ago due to the fact that the latest viruses are transmissible more often.
The government hopes to minimize the impact of the virus by increasing vaccinations and some experts say this is a key part of the way forward.
“If you look at earlier periods in the People’s Republic of China’s history, you see that the strong vaccine programs that work very hard to convince elderly people to receive vaccines are almost opposite of the type of vaccine programs that you see today,” he says.
“The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.
On Wednesday, China’s health authorities overhauled the zero-Covid policy with a 10-point national plan that kept some restrictions, but largely scrapped health code tracking for most public places, rolled back mass testing, allowed many positive cases to quarantine at home and imposed limits on lockdowns of areas deemed “high risk.”
Workers across China have dismantled some of the physical signs of the country’s zero-Covid controls, peeling health code scanning signs off metro station walls and closing some checkpoints after the government unveiled an overhaul of its pandemic policy.
“What can we learn from living in such a chaotic environment?” Beijing resident David Wang, a freelancer, and a friend of the Beijing tech company
But as many residents expressed relief and happiness at the obvious loosening of measures, some worried about its impact and questioned how the new rules would be rolled out.
“The world changed overnight, and that’s really amazing,” said Echo Ding, 30, a manager at a tech company in Beijing. “I feel like we are getting back to normal life. This is important to me because if I don’t get back to a normal life, I might lose my mind.”
“How can it change so fast?” Ding asked. I feel like we’re like fools. It’s all up to them. They said it’s good, so then it’s good … that’s what I feel right now. I have no choice but to think of it as real. All I can do is follow the arrangement.”
David Wang, 33, a freelancer in Shanghai, said although the changes were welcome, they had also sparked a feeling of disbelief in the city, which underwent a chaotic, more than two-month-long, citywide lockdown earlier this year.
Most of my friends can’t believe it is happening, and they are showing typical signs of posttraumatic stress disorder as a result.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/china/china-zero-covid-relaxation-reaction-intl-hnk/index.html
What to do if you get infected by the milder Omicron variant and how China has responded to the Covid-19 protests
The spread of the milder Omicron variant, as well as China’s level of experience in responding to the disease were included in the evidence used to make the changes to the rules.
In the wake of protests across the country against strict Covid restrictions, the government has now relented on its vow to stamp out all infections. The central government made only minor policy changes last month, but had shown no sign of being ready for an imminent change in their national strategy until last week.
The government and state media had long emphasized the dangers of the virus and its potential long-term effects – and used this to justify the maintenance of restrictive policies.
While Omicron may cause relatively milder disease compared to earlier variants, even a small number of serious cases could have a significant impact on the health system in a country of 1.4 billion.
On China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo, topics and hashtags related to what to do if infected by Omicron trended high on Thursday morning, while there were numerous reports of panic buying of fever medications.
What kind of medicine should people have if they get infections, and what to do if they get infections were all left to the imagination. In fact, we should have started doing this a long, long time ago,” said Sam Wang, 26, a lawyer in Beijing, who added that the policy release felt “sudden and arbitrary.”
Bob Li, a graduate student in Beijing, who tested positive for the virus on Friday said he wasn’t afraid of the virus, but his mother, who lives in the countryside, stayed up all night worrying about him. “She finds the virus a very, very scary thing,” Li said.
Fears about the impact of Covid-19 in China may also play out in other areas, as younger people and those in more cosmopolitan urban centers are more likely to support reopening the country and relaxing rules.
How do we live in the 21st century? What do we really know and where to look for after the Covid-19 pandemic?
Meanwhile, his mother was now buying high-grade N95 masks and preparing for a “nuclear winter” until a potential initial wave of cases passed, Wang said.
The guidelines are being implemented differently by local authorities, as they adapt, and many are interested to see how the change affects their cities.
In Beijing, authorities on Wednesday said a health code showing a negative Covid-19 test would still be required for dining in at restaurants or entering some entertainment venues – in conflict with the national guidelines.
The hasty changes may not leave enough time for the older people to get the vaccine. Currently, some 70% of people aged 60 or older, and 40% of those aged 80 or more, have received a third dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
One answer is that as a country, we prefer just to not see those deaths at all, regarding a baseline of several hundred deaths a day as a sort of background noise or morbid but faded wallpaper. We don’t have to comprehend who is dying or why, we don’t want to reckon with the fact that 300,000 Americans die annually from Covid-19, which is the third leading cause of death in the country. This is normalization at work, but it is also a familiar pattern: We don’t exactly track the ups and downs of cancer or heart disease either.
Throughout the last few years, the country has also struggled to consider individual risk and social risk separately. In the first year of the Pandemic, we focused on universal measures to limit spread but under-emphasing some of the differential threat, in order to build our sense of individual risk. We began to build a picture of social risk instead of an individual one with the arrival of vaccines.
The reopening of COVID-19 in China is chaotic and hasty: how to prepare for it and how to deal with it
The announcement follows protests in a number of cities against the strict lockdowns. Those led some cities to loosen some restrictions on testing and movement, but the new guidelines go further.
But the government hasn’t stated the goal of its new policy, which could create confusion, says Huang. The reopening is likely to be a messy and hasty process where local governments discard all the zero-COVID measures without putting in the time and money to prepare for it.
Some aspects of the new rules, including when and where to test people during an outbreak, are open to interpretation by local governments.
Furthermore, the guidelines do not lift testing and quarantine requirements for international travellers, which “doesn’t have a rationale if the objective is no longer zero COVID”, says Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong.
Many people in China live in densely populated high-rise buildings, where it will be difficult to limit transmission. Allowing people to quarantine at home will contribute to viral spread, says George Liu, a public-health researcher at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Hospitals could be overwhelmed by this.
The timing of the reopening is not ideal, say researchers. Winter is peak influenza season so hospitals will already be experiencing a rise in the number of patients. And many people will also be travelling across the country for next month’s Lunar New Year and spring festival, further increasing viral spread, says Xi Chen, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies China’s public-health system.
China doesn’t have a strong system for primary medical care system, such as a network of general practitioners, so people go to hospital for mild conditions, says Xi Chen, who hopes more details on how the government plans to triage care will emerge in the coming days.
Without additional support, the eased restrictions might not help businesses to recover from protracted lockdowns or remove the social stigma attached to COVID-19, says Joy Zhang, a sociologist at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. “I’m afraid that the health and socio-economic risk will be passed on to individuals.”
Urgent guidance is needed on how to curb transmission during a surge, such as through mask mandates, work-from-home policies and temporary school closures, says Cowling. Because of the reduction in testing, it is unclear how officials will know when an outbreak is over, he says.
The guidelines propose training staff and setting up mobile clinics to address people’s safety concerns. But they stop short of issuing vaccine mandates or introducing strong incentives for local governments to increase their vaccination rates, says Huang. Whether the inevitable rise in infections will lead to a spike in deaths remains to be seen. The full impact hasn’t been finished, he says.
Vaccination distribution in China is a problem for the elderly, and Tan Hua’s story resonates with her mother and her mother
“I have an advantage in that I don’t go to an office to work. I don’t have a job in a company or in a government agency, I don’t get to meet a lot of people,” she says. I think that I protect myself well.
Despite a push to boost vaccination among the elderly, the two Beijing centers that gave shots were empty on Tuesday. Despite fears of a major outbreak, there was little evidence of a surge in patient numbers.
Product quality issues have been a problem for years in China and include the production of pharmaceuticals. Cases like Tan Hua’s resonate.
In 2014, Tan, then 34 years old, was bitten by a dog. She saw a doctor and was given a shot of what her mother, Hua Xiuzhen, says they were told was the best rabies vaccine on the market. It didn’t go according to plan.
Vaccination, health care, and the vaccine skeptics: what the Vaccines can do for the COVID-19 epidemic in China?
“That very night she got a headache and dizziness. Her memory declined sharply. She had convulsions. She couldn’t see; everything was dark for her. She couldn’t walk straight,” Hua told NPR by phone.
The vaccine is believed to be the reason for Hua’s crusade for justice. She avoids all vaccines, including those approved by China for COVID-19.
There have been a lot of product quality scandals in China in recent years due to a lack of oversight and corruption.
Yanzhong Huang, a China health care expert at Seton Hall University, says the government has done a bad job of messaging around the virus and debunking myths — despite near total control of the media environment in the country.
“Many of those, the vaccine skeptics, are liberal-minded people. They just don’t trust the Chinese vaccines and the government narrative on the effectiveness of the Chinese vaccines,” he says.
Jerry, a real estate executive in Shanghai, is 33 years old — and a good example of that. He did not want his full name used because he was sensitive to the topic.
Jerry reckons COVID-19 is “kind of a flu thing” these days; nothing too serious. He hasn’t gotten the vaccine and he believes – despite science to the contrary – there’s no point.
I think the virus isevolving quickly. So not a single vaccine can help,” he says, focusing on vaccines’ ability to prevent transmission rather than stave off serious illness and death.
Jerry estimates that the vaccination rate among his friends — educated, 30-somethings in China’s most cosmopolitan city — may be as low as 60%. He says couples trying to get pregnant are particularly fearful of possible side-effects.
The omicron variant hit Hong Kong in the spring, and only about half of people were up to date on their immunizations. The rate of deaths per 100,000 people was the highest in the world, as hospitals were quickly swamped. Only a small percentage of the people who died were fully vaccine protected.
But Huang, of Seton Hall, says the government may be better off bolstering the incentives for people to get the vaccine, and offering assurances of support in case something goes wrong.
China’s rise and decline: CNN’s Meanwhile in China at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, and the challenges it will face
CNN has a version of the story in its Meanwhile in China newsletter, which will provide three times a week updates on the country’s rise and how it affects the world. Sign up here.
Changes continued Monday as authorities announced a deactivation of the “mobile itinerary card” health tracking function planned for the following day.
It had been a point of contention for many Chinese people, including due to concerns around data collection and its use by local governments to ban entry to those who have visited a city with a “high-risk zone,” even if they did not go to those areas within that city.
But as the scrapping of parts of the zero-Covid infrastructure come apace, there are questions about how the country’s health system will handle a mass outbreak.
Businesses were closed in Beijing during the weekend, and streets were mostly deserted, as residents feared that they would catch the swine flu. Outside of the Covid-19 testing booths the biggest public crowds were seen.
China Youth Daily reported on long lines at a clinic in central Beijing on Friday, and quoted experts that called for residents to stay out of hospitals.
An official from the hospital in the capital on Saturday appealed to people with mild or no symptoms, who have calls to the emergency service line, not to call it.
The daily volume of emergency calls had surged from its usual 5,000 to more than 30,000 in recent days, Chen Zhi, chief physician of the Beijing Emergency Center said, according to official media.
Covid was “spreading rapidly” driven by highly transmissible Omicron variants in China, a top Covid-19 expert, Zhong Nanshan, said in an interview published by state media Saturday.
In the early days of the H1N1 epidemic in 2020, a key public voice was quoted saying that it would be difficult to completely cut off the transmission chain.
The rapid rollback of testing nationwide and the shift by many people to use antigen tests at home has also made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread, with official data now appearing meaningless.
Covid-19 vaccines have saved millions of lives in China, according to a state media interview with a Beijing doctor at the Beijing You An Hospital
Outside experts have warned that China may be underprepared to handle the expected surge of cases, after the surprise move to lift its measures in the wake of nationwide protests against the policy, growing case numbers and rising economic costs.
In the interview with state media, the man said the government’s top priority right now should be booster shots for the elderly and others most at risk, especially during the peak travel time of the Chinese lunar new year.
Measures to be undertaken include increasing ICU wards and beds, enhancing medical staff for intensive care and setting up more clinics for fevers, China’s National Health Commission said in a statement.
But experts have warned that the country is poorly prepared for such a drastic exit, having fallen short on bolstering the elderly vaccination rate, upping surge and intensive care capacity in hospitals, and stockpiling antiviral medications.
China’s market watchdog said on Friday that there was a temporary shortage of some “hot-selling” drugs, and vowed to crack down on price gouging, while major online retailerJD.com took steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications went up 18 times.
A hashtag trending on China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo over the weekend featured a state media interview with a Beijing doctor saying people who tested positive for Covid-19 but had no or mild symptoms did not need to take medication to recover.
People with no symptoms need not have medicine at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition ,” Li Tongzeng, chief infectious disease physician at Beijing You An Hospital, said in an interview linked to a hashtag viewed more than 370 million times since Friday.
The Covid-19 vaccines have kept more than 18.5 million people in the US out of the hospital and saved more than 3.2 million lives, a new study says – and that estimate is most likely a conservative one, the researchers say.
To determine exactly how much the shots have helped, researchers from the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health created a computer model of disease transmission that incorporated demographic information, people’s risk factors, the dynamics of infection and general information about vaccination.
One of the study authors said the savings could be much higher if the cases of long Covid that were likely to prevent were taken into account.
“Given the emergency of highly transmissible variants and immune-evading variants like Omicron, it is a remarkable success and an extraordinary achievement,” said Galvani, founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis.
“Don’t wait. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease said on Friday that if you wait you are putting yourself at risk. The late fall and early winter season is about to begin. We’re all going to congregate with our families and friends for the holidays. If you are up to date, great. Don’t wait to get your vaccine if you aren’t.
The national health commission cuts COVID-19 case number reporting as virus epidemics in Beijing, Chaoyang, Gaoji Baikang, and elsewhere
Anyone that is on public transportation should be covered up by the CDC. It also suggests wearing one in other public settings in communities where there is a high level of transmission. People who are at high risk of severe illness should wear masks even in areas with only medium community levels.
The National Health Commission has scaled down its daily report due to a rapid decline in testing since the government softened anti-viruses measures.
A notice on the commission’s website said it stopped publishing daily figures on numbers of COVID-19 cases where no symptoms are detected since it was “impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infected persons,” which have generally accounted for the vast majority of new infections. The only figures they’re reporting are the confirmed cases.
Beijing’s streets have grown eerily quiet, with lines forming outside fever clinics — the number of which has been increased from 94 to 303 — and at pharmacies, where cold and flu medications are harder to find.
A dozen people were waiting for the results of their nucleic acid test at the Beijing clinic. The nurses are wearing full body white protective gear.
A few kilometers (miles) south, at Chaoyang Hospital, about a dozen people waited in a line of blue tents, deflecting winds amid subzero temperatures. The person in the queue sprayed a bottle of water around her as she waited.
Across the street at Gaoji Baikang Pharmacy, around a dozen people waited in line for cough medication and Chinese herbal remedies. The sign at the front told waiting customers that they were doing all they could to stock up on medicine. A man coming out bought two packages of the herbal remedy in order to stop other customers from buying more than that.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/14/1142700327/china-reduces-covid-19-case-number-reporting-as-virus-surges
The Impact of U.S.-Britain COVID-19 on Local Health and Hospitals: China’s Social Media Contagion After the December 7, 2017 Decree
China’s government-supplied figures have not been independently verified and questions have been raised about whether the Communist Party has sought to minimize numbers of cases and deaths.
In response to increased number of Carbonide 19 cases, the U.S. consulates in China have only offered emergency services since Tuesday.
Hospitals have also reportedly been struggling to remain staffed, while packages were piling up at distribution points because of a shortage of China’s ubiquitous motorized tricycle delivery drivers.
Students at some Chinese universities will be allowed to finish their semester from home to avoid a bigger outbreak of COVID-19 during January’s travel rush.
China stopped tracking travel on Tuesday, which may have a negative affect on people going to COVID-19 hot spots. There has been no word on when the restrictions for inbound travelers will be lifted, and Chinese wanting to go overseas.
The move follows the government’s dramatic announcement last week that it was ending many of the strictest measures, following three years during which it enforced some of the world’s tightest virus restrictions.
Last month in Beijing and several other cities, protests over the restrictions grew into calls for Xi and the Communist Party to step down — a level of public dissent not seen in decades. An unknown number of people were arrested in the days after the demonstration, when the party responded with a large show of force.
The University of Hong Kong believes there could be as many as 734 deaths per million people if a nationwide reopening were to happen.
The surge of infections would “likely overload many local health systems across the country,” said the research paper, released last week on the Medrxiv preprint server and which has yet to undergo peer review.
Simultaneously lifting restrictions in all provinces would lead to hospitalization demands 1.5 to 2.5 times of surge hospital capacity, according to the study.
They were the first officially reported deaths since the dramatic easing of restrictions on December 7, although Chinese social media posts have pointed to a surge in demand at Beijing’s funeral homes and crematoriums in recent weeks.
An employee at a funeral home on the outskirts of Beijing told CNN they were swamped by the long queues for cremation, and customers would need to wait until at least the next day to cremate their loved ones.
Emerging epidemics in China: the impact of vaccination, masking and antiviral drug treatment on the survival of people in the city’s public sector
There has been an increase in infections in other major cities. Most of the classes at schools in the city are online from Monday. In the southern metropolis of Guangzhou, authorities have told students that are already taking online classes and pre-schoolers not to prepare for a return to school.
In the megacity of Chongqing in the southwest, authorities announced on Sunday that public sector workers testing positive for Covid can go to work “as normal” – a remarkable turnaround for a city that only weeks ago had been in the throes of a mass lockdown.
The current wave is expected to continue until mid-January, according to Wu. The second wave is believed to last from January to February next year and was triggered by the mass travel leading up to the lunar new year holiday.
The biggest annual human migration on earth happens every year when hundreds of millions of people leave their hometowns to find a life in China’s fast growing cities.
“It is never too late to flatten the curve, and you can do it at any time,” says Cui Chen, an economist at Yale University in Connecticut.
The estimates include only deaths due to COVID-19 and don’t take into account excess deaths because of delayed treating non-COVID-19 diseases, according to one of the modellers.
On 13 December, the government announced that people aged 60 and older, and other high-risk groups, should get a fourth dose of vaccine, preferably one based on a different technology from their primary dose. But of the more than 260 million people in China older than 60, only 70% aged 60 and older, and only 40% aged 80 and more, have received a third dose.
The model shows that the death rate in China will be reduced to 285,000 between now and April if certain measures are put in place. These involve reimposing restrictions, high rates of third- and fourth-dose vaccination and high antiviral drug treatment for at-risk groups. A reduction in deaths to 220,000 could be achieved by widespread mask use. Adherence to masking is high in China, and the eased restrictions have led to changes in behaviour in which people are choosing to restrict their movement, says Mokdad. They won’t let it rip.
The two studies broadly agree on mortality estimates and the impact of interventions, says Cameron. This similarity in part shows that an agreement was reached that herd immunity would only be achieved after a large, difficult to contain, spread of transmission throughout the country.