In mid-November 2021, around the time the Omicron variant was first discovered in South Africa, the Chinese government all but declared victory over COVID-19. For more than 20 months, the country’s zero-COVID policy had come at a steep cost, with stringent controls and draconian lockdowns at the slightest sign of a local outbreak. But as Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the time, the strategy had prevented up to 200 million infections and three million deaths. It was an impressive record that seemed to set the stage for the Beijing Winter Olympics, which China has been determined to hold on schedule, in what would be a powerful demonstration of its success at pandemic control.
Two months later, the situation looks dramatically different. With the games now just days away, China has never seemed closer to an explosive COVID-19 surge. Since December 9, more than 3,000 locally transmitted cases have been reported in about 20 provinces. An outbreak in the northwestern city of Xi’an, with more than 2,000 domestic cases, was the country’s single worst since the Wuhan outbreak that began the global pandemic. And although Omicron is not yet dominant in China, cases caused by the highly transmissible variant have now been detected in at least 14 Chinese provinces. And these cases are despite lockdowns that have recently affected as many as 20 million people.
