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Coronavirus pandemic
ChinaScience

China sticking with ‘zero Covid’, but is it a binary choice?

  • A strategy that has succeeded in containing the country’s outbreaks presents considerable logistical and economic challenges
  • The inevitability of further cases and a waning of vaccine antibody levels beg the question of how long China should persist with it

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Illustration: Brian Wang
Simone McCarthy
A retired couple in China who tested positive for Covid-19 while touring the country’s north have sparked a race to track infections across multiple provinces and regions, becoming the latest example of the challenges for Beijing as it seeks to maintain a zero-Covid policy.
Within three days of an announcement that the couple had tested positive in Xian on Saturday, hundreds of close contacts of the couple and their five travel companions, who later tested positive, had been identified. In that 72 hours, several cities had rolled out mass testing, a land port stopped operating and popular locations visited by the group were closed for disinfection, according to media and the authorities.

Details of the group’s domestic flights and hotels, and stops at roast duck restaurants and noodle shops, spread across official media, with people asked to report where their movements overlapped with the group’s, if missed by the tracking app.

It is all part of China’s emergency strategy to stop the spread of Covid-19. But the use of such measures has become frequent in recent months, because outbreaks and sporadic cases – often of the highly transmissible Delta variant – have too.

06:05

As more countries ditch ‘zero-Covid’ policy, why is China opting to ‘wait and see’?

As more countries ditch ‘zero-Covid’ policy, why is China opting to ‘wait and see’?

“These spikes become more and more common and more and more uncertain,” said Jin Dongyan, a professor at the University of Hong Kong’s medical faculty. “The question becomes whether these small spikes will have the chance to grow into a big one.”

So far, the outsize response appears to have eventually stopped infections spreading and returned case counts to zero – the ultimate goal for the Chinese government as it continues to reject a stance adopted by an increasing number of countries: to live with the virus.

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