Chinese President Xi Jinping's arrival in Central Asia this week in his first overseas travel in nearly three years is perhaps the most consequential irony of the coronavirus pandemic. As the place where the deadly pandemic began in early 2020, China was the first to swiftly and successfully suppress and contain Covid-19 within weeks, while its counterparts in North America and Europe languished for months under mounting death tolls and hospitalisations.
To this day, the number of cases in China remains under 250,000 with Covid-related deaths just over 5,000, giving the country a global ranking of 108 by this metric. Topping the "Worldometers" coronavirus chart, the United States has seen over 97 million cases with deaths exceeding one million. Yet there is more to these numbers if we peer beneath the surface.
Over the past year, the coronavirus table has turned in a paradoxical fashion. Countries like the US that suffered the most early on have reopened faster and freer, thanks to expeditious and efficacious vaccines. Even though its virus caseloads looked out of control in 2020, the US never imposed a quarantine. Now that it has been fully reopened and moved beyond Covid-19 from being a pandemic to something akin to an ordinary flu, the US's free and open posture poses a challenge to China's closed and controlled system. The longer-term lesson may be that more open systems allowed societies to live with the virus sooner, with higher costs in the beginning but ultimately greater gains when economic conditions and social disruptions are considered.
