Since mid-November, China has experienced several demonstrations against the strict sanitary restrictions linked to Covid-19. A rare event illustrated by the protest movement that affected the Foxcon factory, one of Apple’s main suppliers, in the city of Zhengzhou.
The Chinese authorities have been applying the so-called “zero covid” policy since 2020, based on draconian restrictions with cycles of confinement and lack of confinement at the lowest case detected. It is not a question, in China, of limiting the circulation of the virus, but of preventing it completely.
On the one hand, experts agree that this strategy is unsustainable in the long term. On the other hand, abandoning it is a real political and health challenge. So much so that Beijing appears to be at a dead end.
The “Zero Covid” strategy, pride of the Chinese regime
On the purely health side, the “zero covid” policy has borne fruit. Chinese authorities have declared just over 5,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic. If this figure is underestimated, it remains well below that of the vast majority of countries in the world.
Before the arrival of vaccines, many countries implemented “zero covid” strategies, in particular with containment measures. However, governments have gradually abandoned them with the advent of vaccines and the advent of the more transmissible Omicron variant. China has remained camped on this policy.
Against the grain of the rest of the world that agreed to “live with the virus”, Beijing announced its victory over Covid-19 and thus established its regime as clearly superior to Western systems of government. Today, Xi Jinping finds himself stuck: the Chinese president has insisted too much on the merits of his policy to be able to question it, which would risk looking like denial.
A risk of “tsunami” of cases, among a poorly vaccinated population
Beyond the political and ideological aspect, the determining factor also lies in the health risk that abandoning the current measures could entail: significant contamination of an insufficiently protected population.
According to a study published in NatureMedicine, the lifting of restrictions in China would cause a “tsunami” among the population, causing about 1.6 million deaths and sending 5.8 million people to intensive care, according to a study by Bloomberg Intelligence. An unbearable prospect for the authorities since all of Beijing’s policy and discourse is based on the protection of life.
At issue: a poorly vaccinated population, especially among the elderly, also the most vulnerable to the virus. Only 65.8% of people over the age of 80 have received two doses of the vaccine, Chinese health authorities said on Tuesday. A figure that drops to 20% for the third dose.
For cultural reasons, older people are wary of vaccination. In addition, in China, very few older people live in specialized structures that facilitate vaccination campaigns.
limited immunity
Another hurdle for Chinese immunity: The only two Chinese vaccines available, made by Sinovac and Sinopharm, are ineffective and haven’t evolved to accommodate the variants. Beijing has not yet licensed the mRNA vaccines that we know of in Europe. The priority of the Chinese authorities has been to demonstrate that the country has manufactured its own vaccines, despite a rather limited efficacy: to protect adequately, two injections are insufficient.
In early November, a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to China resulted in an agreement to distribute Pfizer’s vaccine in the country, but currently only foreigners residing in China have access to it.
This extremely strict “zero covid” policy therefore did not require a massive vaccination campaign, “test, trace, isolate” being sufficient. A situation that is all the more problematic since very few inhabitants have contracted Covid-19 in China, which further limits herd immunity.
Risk of overcrowding in hospitals
In addition, the Chinese hospital system is not adapted to the 1.4 billion inhabitants and cannot cope with the massive congestion if the restrictions are lifted. According to The expressChina has just 4.5 intensive care or resuscitation beds per 100,000 people, compared with 33.9 in Germany, 28.5 in Taiwan or 25.8 in the United States.
By way of illustration, Hong Kong had adopted a “covid zero” strategy with strict containment and traceback policies. When the measures were relaxed, the number of contaminations skyrocketed.
“I think (the Chinese) are very unprepared and based on what we saw in Hong Kong, which is probably the best approximation of what could happen in China, it could be quite devastating,” said Francois Balloux, director. from University College London’s Institute of Genetics, in an interview with STAT.
According to a work published in the journal NatureMedicine, only two conditions could avoid congestion in the health system and reduce the number of deaths to the level of an influenza season. 97% of people over the age of 60 should be vaccinated with three doses and half of those who have reported symptoms should receive antiviral treatment.
The risk of new variants?
Some experts also fear that a massive circulation of the virus in China if the “zero covid” policy is abandoned will favor the appearance of new variants.
However, according to Marion Koopmans, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, a lack of herd immunity in the country could hinder this, since one of the main triggers for viral evolution is the need for the virus. to evade human immunity.
“If the immunity is not very broad, the selection pressure [sur le virus] it’s not very strong,” Marion Koopmans told STAT. “So that could work against the selection of new variants.”
If measures to ease restrictions have been recently announced in China, as in Guangzhou, for example, the prospect of an abandonment of the Chinese strategy to combat the pandemic still seems remote, especially since the regime finds itself caught in a trap.
However, beyond the protests, it is the virus itself that could undermine this policy. This week nearly 40,000 cases of Covid-19 have been identified in the country, a record that shows a loss of effectiveness of “Covid zero” in terms of health, particularly against Omicron.
Source: BFM TV
