China, Isolated From the World, Is Now the Last Major Country Still Pursuing a 'Zero COVID' Strategy

[MH.Yang]

Supermarkets cant close, people have to eat.

Aside that China still has covid, it simply ignores it. The curve is mathematical impossible.

Not all govts are waste. You think it's impossible, just because you're too incompetent.

 

[OIO]

China, Isolated From the World, Is Now the Last Major Country Still Pursuing a ‘Zero COVID’ Strategy

One by one, 'Zero COIVD' places like Singapore and Australia have decided that the approach is unsustainable.

time.com

For much of the pandemic, a group of places in the Asia-Pacific brought infections to zero, becoming virus-free havens in a world ravaged by the pathogen. Now, with the rise of the delta variant and the proliferation of vaccines, only one is still holding fast to that goal of eliminating Covid-19: China.

With New Zealand preparing to shift away from the zero-tolerance strategy, China’s isolation is complete, raising the stakes on how long it can stick to a playbook that requires closed borders, abrupt lockdowns, and repeated disruption of social and economic activity.

One by one, Covid Zero places like Singapore and Australia have decided that the approach is unsustainable, pivoting instead to vaccination to protect people from serious illness and death while easing off on attempts to control the number of infections.

In contrast, China’s resolve to stamp out every infection appears to have only grown stronger, though 75% of its vast population is fully vaccinated. The country is now grappling with its fourth delta-driven flareup in two months and this week locked down a prefecture in the western Xinjiang province over two asymptomatic infections during a peak tourism period.

The Chinese territory of Hong Kong, which has so far avoided local transmission of delta, has also made clear that its status as a global financial hub is less important than links to the mainland and the joint goal of elimination.

The task is likely to get even harder as cold weather — the conditions in which the virus spreads best — descends. In three months, Beijing will host the Winter Olympics, welcoming thousands of athletes from around the world.

“Covid Zero in the medium- to long-term is unsustainable,” said Peter Collignon, an infectious disease physician and professor at the Australian National University Medical School. “Delta shows the almost impossibility of that. It’s hard to see how China will be able to get to zero Covid this winter.”

Still, the status has become a political point of pride for China, with authorities trumpeting their success in containing the virus as an ideological and moral victory over the U.S. and other nations now treating the virus as endemic.

New Zealand Pivot

New Zealand’s planned shift underscores the mounting futility of the elimination strategy. In mid-August, the country went into the highest level of restrictions when a single person was diagnosed with Covid-19 in Auckland. No working in the office. No going out to dinner or the gym or church. In most cases, no leaving the house.

Seven weeks later, it’s still reporting more than two dozen infections daily, prompting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to acknowledge on Monday that “long periods of heavy restrictions have not gotten us to zero cases.”

“But that is OK,” she said. “Elimination was important because we didn’t have vaccines. Now we do, so we can begin to change the way we do things.”

It’s an adjustment already made by Singapore and Australia, two other lauded examples of containment. In both places, fatigue among the population had grown over stop-start cycles of lockdown and travel curbs that imposed weeks of mandatory quarantine on new arrivals. In Taiwan, officials said that elimination was too difficult to achieve earlier this year after a large outbreak, though it’s now reported no cases for several days straight.

The abandonment of the zero-tolerance goal now does not mean the strategy was wrong-headed from the start. The approach allowed these economies to suppress Covid fatalities to a very low level, getting through the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic with little damage — unlike the U.S. and Europe. New Zealand has suffered 27 Covid-related deaths while Singapore has seen just 121.

“If New Zealand can vaccinate widely, get access to new treatments and open cautiously, they’ll have escaped the pandemic with little economic or health loss,” wrote Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at Edinburgh University Medical School, in Scotland. “They managed to press pause and wait for scientific solutions toward a sustainable exit.”

Degree of Control

The question is now what China’s exit strategy will look like. It reported two new local cases on Oct. 5, one in each of the outbreaks – in Harbin and Xinjian – that are currently underway.

In the most recent flareup in Xinjiang, tens of thousands of residents are being tested, while Yining city has halted all trains and flights and closed the local highways, The Paper reported.

Two people were found to be infected in the city of Horgos on Oct. 3, which borders Kazakhstan. Though all 38,376 residents were tested and found negative for the virus, and the two original cases were asymptomatic, all tourists in the prefecture Horgos is located in — Yili — have been stopped from returning home and told to stay indoors until further notice. Local governments were arranging food and lodging for them, the Beijing Youth Daily reported.

The latest breakout followed the contours of earlier ones. Officials shut down the northern city of Harbin after a single patient was hospitalized in September. The port of Ningbo, one of the world’s busiest, was closed in August, while manufacturing took a hit because of the restrictions.

The sporadic resurgences are unlikely to stop, public health experts said. But China’s authoritarian government has always been capable of feats beyond the imagination of most other countries.

“The kind of capacity and degree of control they can exert is remarkable,” said Michael Baker, a professor at the University of Otago’s Department of Public Health in Wellington, who sits on the New Zealand government’s Covid-19 Technical Advisory Group. “It’s way beyond what we can do, not just from a point of view of resources but the social license that governments have. We wouldn’t be able to exert the kind of control that China is able to exert, even in achieving a good end, which is managing an outbreak.”

Officials in China have said they won’t stick to Covid Zero forever, though it will only consider a change when the approach no longer works or the costs are too high — parameters of which have not been made public. City governments are being asked to create specialized quarantine facilities that could house thousands of overseas arrivals by the end of October, signaling that onerous travel curbs are unlikely to be eased in the near term.

Achieving elimination allowed life in China to be largely normal through most of 2020 and 2021, powering its economy even as most others were sapped by mitigation measures of various efficacy. But as its snap lockdowns and restrictions on movement continue through this year — and western economies resume full operations after vaccination — the impact is starting to show more deeply. Retail sales growth slowed to 2.5% in August from a year earlier, falling far short of the 7% expansion estimated by analysts.

Regardless of China’s tolerance for the approach, some experts say that Covid-free havens may yet return. Governments like New Zealand could resurrect the goal if and when new medical options become available.

“Maybe we are reaching the limits of what we can do with our current tools to eliminate transmission,” said Baker, who believes a Covid Zero strategy is still on the table. “We could find that the next generation of Covid vaccines or anti-virals are so effective that they can eliminate the virus quite effectively.”

Thank you to the world outside of China for doing the stress test of the virus for us this winter.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

Thank you to the world outside of China for doing the stress test of the virus for us this winter.

Are you kidding me? Westerners consider virus as God's children, same as humans. Westerners do not consider virus evil like Chinese do. Chinese have no religion. So Chinese do not tolerate virus.

 

[casual]

Supermarkets cant close, people have to eat.

Aside that China still has covid, it simply ignores it. The curve is mathematical impossible.

grocery delivery service. there's no need for supermarkets to open.

 

[MH.Yang]

Its a flawed concept, thats why all natioms simply dropmit. Its like trying zero flu. Simply not working.

Very simply, if there are only 10 or fewer cases in a city, check their action track within 14 days, track all exposed people and do PCR for them. If there are more than 10, the city will be blocked and PCR will be performed for all residents of the city. If cases are found, another round of PCR will be performed.
It doesn't need to be blocked for a long time. Our city has been blocked for only 10 days and all cases have been found.

 

[Mista]

Yes. North Korea has done an exemplary job with it's Covid response if the data is true.

This is the beauty of having data. It allows you to make comparisons.

So North Korea is "more responsible and superior" than China here?

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

grocery delivery service. there's no need for supermarkets to open.

Too expensive in the west.

Very simply, if there are only 10 or fewer cases in a city, check their action track within 14 days, track all exposed people and do PCR for them. If there are more than 10, the city will be blocked and PCR will be performed for all residents of the city. If cases are found, another round of PCR will be performed.
It doesn't need to be blocked for a long time. Our city has been blocked for only 10 days and all cases have been found.

The west will never PCR test every person in a city. This action violates human rights. We don't send police door to door arresting people if they don't want PCR test.

 

[Place Of Space]

Heh, China is a victim of its own success. Because China is so successful in containing the virus, many people like you especially the elderly find little benefit in getting vaccinated. They worry more of the side effects than getting Covid. And if a significant percentage of elderly don't get vaccinated, China cannot loosen restrictions and will have to lockdown whenever there are cases.

It's the same in HK and Singapore as well.

I didn't worry the side effects, just dislike syringe. My immunity is very strong, I even rarely get flu.

 

[luciferdd]

Too expensive in the west.


The west will never PCR test every person in a city. This action violates human rights. We don't send police door to door arresting people if they don't want PCR test.

That's your problem,not china's.We chineses are satisfied with living in a place that there's no COID-19.

 

[Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen]

That's your problem,not china's.We chineses are satisfied with living in a place that there's no COID-19.

While the rest of the world acquired natural immunity against the virus by means of infection, Chinese are vulnerable to it. It appears Chinese are not the ones having the last laugh.

 

[Mista]

I didn't worry the side effects, just dislike syringe. My immunity is very strong, I even rarely get flu.

Wow, that's even a more selfish reason not to get vaccinated.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

All these people who hate China and want China to fail and are self declared enemies, adversaries and rivals of China, are suddenly very concerned that restrictions in China, are supposedly "isolating China". They state that COVID zero policy is harmful for China. They oppose it.

Hmmm...

 

[luciferdd]

While the rest of the world acquired natural immunity against the virus by means of infection, Chinese are vulnerable to it. It appears Chinese are not the ones having the last laugh.

1.There is no natural immunity at COID-19, the antibody against COID-19 will decrease to a verylow level after 6~12months.
2.COID-19 mutate constantly and quickly,no one can ensure that it will never mutate to a new variety with High infectivity and high mortality like Delta++.
3.When you can acquire the antibody through vaccines，why you still want to acquire the antibody by infecting the virus？That's really stupid~~
4.China will cancel the isolation when scientists find an efficient treatment to COID-19 but not now,it will not happens in a short term.

 

[OIO]

Are you kidding me? Westerners consider virus as God's children, same as humans. Westerners do not consider virus evil like Chinese do. Chinese have no religion. So Chinese do not tolerate virus.

Kind and peaceful Westerners can tolerate the virus but cannot tolerate the Chinese.

 

[obj 705A]

All these people who hate China and want China to fail and are self declared enemies, adversaries and rivals of China, are suddenly very concerned that restrictions in China, are supposedly "isolating China". They state that COVID zero policy is harmful for China. They oppose it.

Hmmm...

All countries except China are screwed, for example in Singapore there is a surge in cases during the past few weeks even though Singapore has high vaccination rate (80%), even if deaths are low for now the fact that covid is circulating freely means that a portion of the population will always be in fear and will never go back to normal, also since Covid is mutating constantly it is irreseponsible to let it circulate because then it will become more and more resistant to vaccines. so what will they do, give a booster shoot every six months?