China is on the brink of its first major Covid surge. How it copes will affect us all | Devi Sridhar
With relatively low vaccination rates and a lack of reliable data, 60% of the population may soon be infected
The Chinese government has changed its approach from “zero Covid” to “living with Covid”. This is largely because the virus has become too transmissible to contain: new variants have emerged that cause one person to infect an estimated 16 others. As part of this shift towards “living with Covid”, entire cities are no longer in lockdown, restrictions have been lifted on domestic travel and people who test positive can now isolate at home instead of at government facilities. Testing has become voluntary, and asymptomatic cases of Covid-19 are no longer being counted. Meanwhile, the government is urging vaccine uptake among elderly people and vulnerable groups.
What is baffling global health experts is why China took so long to vaccinate these groups, and why the government didn’t accept western vaccines such as the mRNA vaccines, which proved to be the most effective at preventing severe illness. The US director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, said Xi Jinping seemed “unwilling to take a better vaccine from the west, and is instead relying on a vaccine in China that’s just not nearly as effective against Omicron”. China’s government insisted on trying to develop its own vaccine, which caused a costly and deadly time delay. While many other nations vaccinated their populations in 2021 and boosted in 2022, rates of vaccination in China are comparatively low: only about 50% of the population have received three shots.
Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh
