Zero Covid seems to be ending in China. After three years of pushing this policy, the message from the state has now changed: each person’s health is now their own responsibility. State media is emphasising ‘new evidence’ showing that Omicron has a lighter viral load than previous strains. Meanwhile, testing sites across the country are being dismantled and new vaccination targets have been set to protect the most vulnerable.
Some Chinese are bemused, asking themselves: ‘do protests work?’ The timing certainly suggests so – in the same week as student leaders were being rounded up, state media started talking about how Covid has no long term complications and quietly dropped the phrase ‘zero Covid’. Though there were earlier, tentative signs that the state was ready to end its zero-Covid policy. Last month, for instance, the State Council in Beijing released a list of 20 ‘optimisations’ for pandemic control (such as shortening quarantine).
The approach to Covid may have changed, but the Chinese battle with the virus is only just beginning. Zero Covid had put the country in stasis, delaying the fight against community infection to now. Yet 1.4 billion Chinese have next to no natural immunity, while fewer than half of over-eighties have been boosted. There are 3.6 ICU beds per 100,000 people (compared to the US’s 34.7 and the UK’s 6.6).
As much as I welcome this opening up, I am already starting to worry for members of my own family who have so far refused to be vaccinated. They live in Nanjing, in the east of the country, and have never been infected. When case rates were low, my uncles and aunts saw no reason to take the risk of receiving a new vaccine. But now they seem to be preparing to be infected: the family WeChat group is now full of online advice they’ve seen about what being infected feels like and what medicines to take if you test positive.
Lockdowns will probably continue to be deployed to control the speed of infections. And if hospitals are seriously overrun and the death toll starts to climb uncontrollably, Beijing may well revert to the safety blanket of zero Covid. But, for now, it appears Xi Jinping has realised that it’s impossible to contain Omicron. The next few years will not be easy, but the optimists among us can hope that this is the beginning of the end for China’s Covid hell.
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