file | A child reacts to a sore throat during a mass test for COVID-19 in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province, Tuesday, August 3, 2021.
The Delta variant is challenging China’s costly strategy of isolating cities, warning that Chinese leaders who were confident they could keep the coronavirus out of the country needed a less disruptive approach.
As the highly contagious version prompts renewing restrictions in the United States, Australia and elsewhere, President Xi Jinping’s government is fighting the most severe outbreak since last year’s peak in Wuhan. The ruling Communist Party is reviving China’s shutdown strategy: Entry to the city of 1.5 million people has been cut off, flights canceled and mass testing ordered in some areas.
The “zero tolerance” strategy of dropping every case and trying to prevent new infections from overseas helped contain last year’s outbreak and kept China largely virus-free. But its impact on the work and lives of millions is warning that China will have to learn to control the virus without repeatedly shutting down the economy and society.
Zhang Wenhong, a Shanghai doctor who became prominent during the Wuhan outbreak, suggested in a social media post that China’s strategy may be changing. “We will definitely learn more”, he said, describing it as a stress test for the nation.
“The world needs to learn to coexist with this virus,” wrote Zhang, who has 3 million followers on the widely used Sina Weibo platform.
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China’s control will be tested as thousands of athletes, journalists and others arrive for the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February. And the ruling party faces a politically sensitive change of leadership at the end of 2022, for which leaders want upbeat economic conditions.
Last year, China shut down the world’s second-largest economy and cut off nearly all access to cities with a total of 60 million people – a strategy emulated by small-scale governments from Asia to the Americas. This led to China’s most painful economic contraction in five decades, but Beijing was able to allow trade and domestic travel to resume in March 2020.
The new infections, many of those who have already been vaccinated, have jolted global financial markets, which worry Beijing’s response could disrupt manufacturing and supply chains. Main stock indices in Shanghai, Tokyo and Hong Kong sank on Tuesday but were rising again on Thursday.
Xi Chen, a health economist at the Yale School of Public Health, said China needed to create barriers to infection within communities by vaccinating and treating infected people quickly, while allowing trade and travel to move forward. He said the country needs access to the full range of vaccines, including allowing in the shot, developed by Germany’s BioNTech.
“I don’t think ‘zero tolerance’ can be sustained,” Chen said. “Even if you could lock down all the regions in China, people could still die, more likely to die of hunger or loss of jobs.”
But Beijing has shown no sign of abandoning its strategy.
An official with the National Health Commission’s Bureau of Disease Control, Qinghua, told a news conference on Saturday that disease control “must be faster, more resolute, stricter, more detailed and prepared.”
The biggest outbreak of the year has been traced to airport workers who cleaned a Russian airliner in Nanjing, northwest of Shanghai, in Jiangsu province, on July 10, according to health officials.
Some passengers flew from Nanjing to Zhangjiajie, a popular tourist destination southwest of Shanghai in Hunan province, turning that city into the epicenter of the virus’s spread. The disease was carried to more than 10 provinces in Beijing and other cities.
On Tuesday, Zhangjiajie’s government announced that no one was allowed to leave the city, mimicking the controls imposed on Wuhan, where the first virus cases were identified, and other cities last year.
Flights to the nearby cities of Nanjing and Yangzhou, which have 94 cases, were suspended. Trains to Beijing from those cities and 21 others were cancelled. Jiangsu province set up highway checkpoints to test drivers. The government called on the people of Beijing and the southern province of Guangzhou not to leave those areas if possible.
In Yangzhou, children were quarantined at two tutoring centers after a classmate tested positive, according to Zhou Xiaoxiao, a university student there. He said some parts of the city have been sealed.
Zhou said eggs and some other food were scarce after shoppers pulled out of supermarkets in anticipation of the lockdown. He said that the government is delivering rice to the homes.
“Vegetable prices have gone up. It’s nothing to me. But the kind of family life that isn’t very good and those with no income, it’s a lot of trouble,” said 20-year-old Zhou.
The 1,142 infections reported since mid-July, many of them linked to Nanjing, are modest compared to the thousands of new daily infections in India or the United States. But he shocked leaders in China, which has not recorded a fatality since early February.
The Global Times, a newspaper published by the ruling party’s People’s Daily, said the outbreak poses “serious challenges to the country’s difficult victory in the pandemic’s battle”.
China has reported 4,636 deaths out of nearly 93,000 confirmed cases.
So far, most people infected in Nanjing had been vaccinated, and some cases are serious, Yang Yi, head of the critical care unit at the city’s Southeast University Hospital, told Shanghai news outlet The Paper.
She said that means “vaccines are protective” – although there remains concern that Chinese-made vaccines offer less protection than some others.
Authorities have blamed Nanjing airport managers and local authorities for failing to enforce safety rules and detecting infections for 10 days until July 20 after the virus spread.
Police announced that a 64-year-old woman, who is believed to have carried the virus from Nanjing to Yangzhou, was arrested on Tuesday for obstructing the containment of the disease.
According to news reports, sanitation workers at Nanjing’s new international terminal mingled with colleagues in the domestic wing when they should have been isolated. The Russian flight was diverted due to bad weather from Shanghai, where the airport is better equipped to handle foreign passengers.
Nevertheless, the city of 9.3 million people is the second largest city in eastern China after Shanghai and has more resources than many smaller cities.
Economist Chen said China needs to learn how to “allow the virus to exist” in areas with high vaccination rates and robust health care. He said that in some areas at least 80% of adults have been vaccinated.
“I don’t think they’re blind to it,” Chen said. “They should already be thinking about it.”
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