Coronavirus: China’s local transmission crisis eases, eclipsed by imported Covid-19 cases
- On Monday, 51 new cases – including 13 found locally and 38 imported – were reported in China, suggesting success of the country’s strict control measures
- Five officials in Henan province were sacked, accused of poor management of epidemic control measures or containment rules
But China’s zero-tolerance policy stands in contrast with the approach of some countries, such as Britain, that promote the idea of living with the virus – at a cost.
“We expect another slowdown in [quarter-on-quarter] GDP growth in Q3 due to the new Covid outbreak and the accompanying restrictions,” said Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at the research firm Oxford Economics. China’s approach, he said, meant future outbreaks would pose significant risk to the country’s outlook.
Of the local cases reported on Monday, Yangzhou in Jiangsu province accounted for six cases, as did Henan province – another focal point of the latest wave of infections – which saw six cases that were previously reported as asymptomatic. In early August, the number of newly reported daily local cases reached as high as three times that of imported cases.
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Supply chain disruptions and restrictions to mobility because of Covid-19 outbreaks were a reason for a sharp weakening of growth momentum in China, Kuijs said.
The prices of agricultural produce had risen 50 per cent because of panic buying that saw three times the normal consumption and the sudden restriction of traffic and inflow of people, the Yangzhou government said in a press conference on August 3, when 40 new daily cases were reported and 3,235 people identified as close contacts.
Since then, the province in eastern China has reported 802 confirmed cases, with 552 found in Yangzhou and 235 in the capital Nanjing. In Henan, 201 patients remained in hospital, the vast majority of whom were infected locally.
While pressure has ramped up to abandon the zero-tolerance approach to restart the global economy, China did not meet the prerequisites to abandon the policy, said Dr Leung Chi-chiu, a respiratory medicine specialist based in Hong Kong.
“In China, only about 50 per cent of people have had two doses of the vaccine and the vaccination drive for the elderly has been slow because of a later roll-out,” he said. “Another issue is that because the epidemic was well controlled in the past, there was no widespread infection of the virus or its variants to support herd immunity.”
Leading epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan has said China needed an 83 per cent vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity, where enough individuals in a population had developed antibodies to reduce the prevalence of the coronavirus. A person could form antibodies through vaccination or by being infected with the virus.
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“Abandoning the zero-tolerance approach entails abandoning the protection of lives,” Leung said.
China could only consider forgoing the zero-tolerance approach when enough of the population was vaccinated, to ensure that the economic recovery that came with a strictly controlled epidemic did not go to waste, Leung said.
“Maybe they could do that next year, but definitely not now,” he said. “If China does it now, it poses a great threat to the economy and the lives and livelihoods of people.”
China’s approach to curbing the spread of the virus also included the sacking of officials deemed incompetent at keeping infections at bay.
Five officials in Yucheng county of Shangqiu city in Henan – including the deputy head of the county – were removed from office after being found lacking in coordinating epidemic control measures or not strictly implementing containment measures, the city’s supervision commission said on Monday. Three other local officials were reprimanded.
