By Pu Jin
As the world crawls in year three of COVID-19, combating COVID-19 and strengthening pandemic governance still remains a daunting challenge in 2022. Over the past two years, the emergence of several infectious variants, like Omicron, is changing the calculus and once again highlights the vulnerability of all countries to a transnational spread of disease. While most of the world is moving toward a strategy of living with the virus, China is doubling down on a strategy to crush the virus considering that variants like Omicron are going to create far more of a challenge and lead to more disruptions than previous variants. China continues to rely on some of the strictest restrictions since the outbreak began including targeted lockdowns, travel restrictions, mass testing, and swift medical actions.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has strongly held to a zero-COVID strategy consisting of strict containment measures that have served the country remarkably well. Zero-COVID strategy, also known as COVID-zero or “Find, Test, Trace, Isolate and Support (FTTIS)”, is a public health policy that has been implemented by some countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. This strategy has been practised to varying degrees by Australia, Atlantic and Northern Canada, China, New Zealand, Singapore, Scotland, South Korea, Tonga and Vietnam. However, the world’s most populous country has gone from reporting fewer than 100 daily infections just three weeks ago to more than 1,000 per day for over a week, yet a marginal figure relative to the size of the country’s population.
China’s first Omicron cases were reported in mid-December, however, lately, clusters have been found in more than a dozen of China’s provinces and these new cases are putting the government’s zero-COVID strategy to test. The highly infectious variant has been now detected in major cities including Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing, and scientists fear that fresh outbreaks might fuel a surge in COVID-19 cases. Sure thing, a surge of this size would not trouble most countries but China has implemented strict lockdowns and introduced rounds of mass testing to crush any hint of an outbreak. Even though Omicron is tough to contain, its increased transmissibility and ability to evade vaccine-derived immunity have hardened support for China’s unwavering strategy among some scientists, although infection rates have remained relatively low at 2.35 infections per million people.
Despite being the first place to be hit by COVID-19, the Chinese government has been very successful in mobilizing the entire state mechanism and all possible resources in the battle proved to be the most effective governance in emergencies like pandemics. The speed of China’s response has always been the crucial factor as China is well placed to tackle the disease and has a centralised epidemic response system. As mask continues to be part of the national wardrobe for the foreseeable future, China’s swift and severe measures at containing the virus have become a source of national pride. Throughout the pandemic, China’s international borders have effectively been closed and aside from international travel disruptions, life has been largely normal. The widespread availability of vaccines, smoothed the way for the return of weddings, dining, travel, and sports and all coexisted alongside vaccine holdouts. The focus of China’s countermeasures shifted from controlling local transmission to preventing the virus from taking hold as a result of imported cases.
Regardless of China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of transmission, the recent surge in the highly transmissible Omicron variant outbreaks have become more frequent and widespread. Not since the early days of the pandemic has China seen so many new locally transmitted cases and many foreign experts have started questioning the validity of the government’s zero-COVID strategy. However, experts believe that abandoning the zero-COVID strategy would lead to a devastating outbreak that would overwhelm the health care system and disrupt social stability unless COVID-19 comes under control in the rest of the world. As China battles its largest outbreak since the early days of the pandemic, Chinese President Xi Jinping has said his country will stick with its zero-COVID strategy, state TV reported.
Nonetheless, China’s official death toll has remained under 5,000, and its total reported caseload of 131,000 is significantly lower than the 78 million cases in the United States or the 18.4 million in the United Kingdom. Researchers at China’s Lanzhou University have said they are confident China will bring the latest outbreak under control in early April. Despite populations eager to consider a future beyond the coronavirus, experts warn that it’s still too soon for the world to drop mitigation measures as there is always the lingering fear that the longer the virus spreads the greater the possibility of a new and even more deadly variant. This vulnerability reinforces the imperative for governments to treat serious outbreaks as security threats and protect their own populations first and foremost, as it will not be over anywhere until it’s over everywhere, but it will definitely not last forever.
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