China has stuck by its zero-Covid strategy with mass testing as other countries grapple with living with the virus | BBC News - Stephen McDonell:
November 6, 2021 - "A person walks into a five-star hotel to ask briefly for directions and ends up in two weeks quarantine because a guest had some coronavirus contact. One crew member on a high-speed train has close contact with an infected person, and a trainload of passengers is sent to quarantine.... In Shanghai Disneyland, 33,863 visitors suddenly have to undergo mass testing because a visitor the day before got infected. Welcome to life in the country which now feels like a perpetual, back-to-zero-Covid world.
"China was the first country to impose restrictions to combat this pandemic and it will be one of the last to ease them.... Not so long ago, other countries like Australia, New Zealand and Singapore were also approaching each outbreak of the coronavirus as something that had to be completely stamped out in the community, sending cities into lockdown until the virus stopped spreading. The goal was to reach zero local transmissions.
"The two things that changed this approach were the emergence of the much tougher to control Delta variant of the disease and, more crucially, reaching high vaccination levels. High vaccination rates meant people might still contract Covid-19, but not have to go to hospital. As a result, borders elsewhere are opening to international travel.... Elsewhere, people are 'living with the virus'.
"Not in China, where yet another Delta outbreak is being attacked with the same zeal as before the vaccine. If the official figures are accurate, over 1,000 local transmissions have been recorded since October. The figure is not that high, but the spread is significant, hitting 21 provinces. This matters because even a couple of cases in China will trigger the same strict measures as hundreds or thousands of new infections....
"Professor Guan Yi, a virologist from Hong Kong University and adviser to the government, has called for a switch from mass nucleic acid tests (which find infections) to mass antibody tests (which might help scientists understand the effectiveness of vaccines). In an interview with Phoenix TV he said that in the long run, there is no chance that a zero-Covid strategy could work in terms of achieving complete elimination. 'The virus is permanent now,' he said. 'It's the same as influenza, which will circulate in humans for a long time'....
"In China however, the government has drilled the population to mobilise to get back to zero cases with each new surge of the virus. Changing this message will be hard.... Dr Huang Yanzhong, from the New-York based Council on Foreign Relations, says a key problem is that vaccines cannot achieve what the Chinese government would like them to.... 'They're not confident about the effectiveness of the vaccines - the ability to prevent infections,' he told the BBC, 'because actually even the best vaccines can't prevent infections - but the zero-tolerance strategy says we can't accept even one single infection.' Dr Huang added the Chinese government has found itself in a political and ideological bind when trumpeting its successes to its people.... 'The zero-tolerance strategy is also part of the official narrative, to claim the success of the Chinese pandemic response model, the superiority of the Chinese political system'....
"Beijing has some big events coming up and there is great desire amongst officials to hold them in an environment free of any Covid outbreak. Most immediately there is the Winter Olympics in February. Tickets have not gone on sale but the goal is to have spectators in the stands.... Another rather bleak interpretation is that General Secretary Xi Jinping and his administration like the idea of reducing foreign influence in China, and the pandemic has provided an excellent excuse to move in this direction.... The emphasis of governance here has certainly shifted from a 'reform and opening up' philosophy to one that places the Communist Party at the centre of everything and its leader Xi Jinping at its very core....
"For many of those wanting to enter China or to leave it, they have no choice but to wait and see.... In the meantime, mass testing, centralised quarantine, transport controls, high-level surveillance, delivering track and trace as well as strict, localised lockdowns will remain a big part of life in China."
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59257496
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