Coronavirus: China sticks to ‘zero tolerance’ stand on Delta variant
- The ‘zero tolerance’ strategy has worked before and can work again as the country confronts cases across the country, senior health official says
- It all depends on strict enforcement, he says
It is an approach that relies on mass vaccination, mass testing, stay-at-home orders and contact tracing.
China’s commitment to that strategy still holds, with an official from the National Health Commission’s disease control and prevention bureau saying on Thursday that China had contained the Delta variant once before, and could do it again, if containment measures were strictly enforced.
“A while ago, China successfully contained a local transmission of the Delta variant in densely populated and transient cities in Guangdong province. This proves that vaccines, mask wearing, hand washing, social distancing and avoiding gatherings are effective,” administration inspector He Qinghua said.
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He was referring to an outbreak of the Alpha and Delta variants in the southern Guangdong province that started in May through imported cases.
After roughly 200 people were infected, health authorities managed to stop local transmission in one month with no deaths, according to the provincial health commission.
With more than 500 people testing positive for the Delta strain in at least 17 provinces, the latest outbreak brought more complex challenges to China, He said.
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“[But] if containment measures are strictly enforced everywhere, I think the current outbreak can be mostly controlled within two to three incubation periods,” He said.
Since mid-July, the Delta variant has become the leading strain of Covid-19 in the United States, accounting for more than 80 per cent of new cases, according to the US CDC. On Wednesday, the US reported more than 90,000 new infections.
“The United States is standing at a dire inflection point, with pandemic coronavirus cases surging and only 50 per cent of the population fully vaccinated,” Science magazine reported this week.
Delta has also taken a hold in countries such as Britain, where there are no strict social distancing measures.
More than 30,000 new cases of the strain have been reported in Britain since last week, surpassing the total number of cases of the Alpha variant. Delta accounted for more than 324,000 infections in total compared to the Alpha variant’s 277,000 cases, according to British government data.
The Delta variant is also testing other countries with a zero-tolerance approach. In Australia, which fended off an outbreak in July, just 17 per cent of the population was vaccinated as of Thursday, and three of its major cities were under lockdown to contain the spread.
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Vaccination rates are much higher in China, which is aiming for herd immunity.
But just how many people have had their shots and the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines is not clear.
China had administered 1.74 billion doses as of Thursday but did not say how many were fully vaccinated.
In Beijing, 18 million people, or about 80 per cent of the city’s population, were fully vaccinated by Wednesday. In theory, the capital has reached herd immunity but the city recorded three locally transmitted cases on Wednesday.
Early studies suggested that fully vaccinated people infected with the Delta variant carried as much virus in their nose and throat as the unvaccinated, although those inoculated cleared the infection faster, according to scientists in the US and Singapore.
In Nanjing, where the outbreaks in China started, health authorities said research was under way on the issue.
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Nanjing has also completed three rounds of mass Covid-19 testing, while the neighbouring city of Yangzhou went into lockdown and suspended public transport. Other cities such as Zhangjiajie and Wuhan have also conducted mass testing and issued stay-at-home orders.
Infectious disease expert Zhong Nanshan credited Guangdong’s success to high quality contact tracing that carried out genetic sequencing for almost all of the patients, giving comprehensive data of the transmission chain, according to an interview last month with China News Service.
This was something that other places in China had not been able to do, Zhong was quoted as saying.
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Other experts were not so confident. Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the zero-tolerance approach was not sustainable.
“It is also unnecessary. In the long run Covid-19 may develop into something like the seasonal flu, with case fatality rates approaching that of the flu. Nobody is talking about not tolerating any cases of the flu,” Huang said.
According to leaked minutes obtained by Chinese news outlet Caixin, Zeng Guang, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told an internal meeting that compared to the wild strain of the coronavirus, Delta was 10 times harder to contain, and was a big challenge to the zero-tolerance strategy.
He recommended that containment measures shift away from completely stamping out the virus towards a moderate approach.
Zeng confirmed to Caixin the document was authentic but said it was not authorised for external publication.
