Since successfully containing the first Wuhan outbreak in April 2020, China has had more than two and a half years to prepare for the end of its zero-COVID policy, which placed strict restrictions on a public increasingly tired of life under lockdowns. But Beijing hasn’t used that time wisely. The COVID-19 wave now surging across the country is hitting a deeply underprepared health care system. Streets once empty because of lockdowns are now empty because people are only venturing out to get medicine. Other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, abandoned strict containment policies but were able to contain hospitalizations and deaths because they had used the time they bought for themselves to vaccinate their citizens, educate their publics, and build up health care supply chains. These countries escaped the extremely high infection rates of the first year of the pandemic in countries such as the United States despite omicron waves, putting their decision-making in stark contrast to China’s.
China’s comparative success or failure won’t be clear for years, if ever, but the picture on the ground so far ranges from disappointing to frightening. The years of the pandemic were spent shoring up zero-COVID controls to extremes, not expanding the health care system. Overconfidence and over-investment in zero-COVID measures, combined with political demands and propaganda, have left health care workers uncertain as to what to do and the Chinese public dangerously vulnerable.
Reliable numbers are impossible to obtain. The official figures are an increasingly ludicrous fiction. The withdrawal of the onerous testing system has moved China from one extreme to another, with citizens forming social media groups to work together to find testing kits which are suddenly in short supply. China maintains that there have only been seven deaths since the zero-COVID policy effectively ended on Dec. 7, even as the bodies pile up in crematoriums and fever clinics. In part, this is because of China’s extremely narrow definition of COVID-19 deaths, a policy choice that continues the country’s past undercounting of flu deaths. Virtually any pre-existing condition is being seized on to avoid classifying a death as due to COVID-19, while other fatalities are being attributed, as with flu, to “pneumonia” or “cardiac arrest” rather than the trigger of COVID-19.
