Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Some three years ago, the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong had become a pain in China’s neck. Now the fifth wave of a rapidly spiraling rate of Covid-19 infections in the same restive region has panicked Beijing to clamp the severest lockdowns in Shanghai and other north-eastern provinces of the country.
To control runaway infections of Omicron’s B.A.2 sub-variant, China on March 28 imposed a hard five-day lockdown in half of Shanghai, its financial capital and a global hub of international finance and trade, with a population of over 25 million. The authorities have directed all these residents to compulsorily undergo the diagnostic test, as infections soared despite the zero-tolerance policy. It will lock down the other half of Shanghai in the second phase.
Officially, the Chinese had reported nearly 6,000 new infections on March 30, according to the South China Morning Post. This is significantly higher than the 326 cases detected only last Wednesday. Shanghai reported 2,678 cases on Sunday, 3,500 on Monday, and 4,477 on Tuesday.
Compared to tens of thousands of fresh cases reported daily in several countries, China’s official numbers seem very low. It reported 8,655 cases on Wednesday, the highest single-day figure since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020.
This sudden spurt in infections shows mainland China could see its zero-tolerance policy go for a toss and follow the Hong Kong way. Hong Kong, despite strict measures, has seen an explosion of cases in the last couple of months and reported tens of thousands of infections and hundreds of deaths, every day.
The global financial city’s hospitals have been overwhelmed. Even morgues could not deal with the flow of dead bodies, the media reported.
This has panicked China so much that every known case, even asymptomatic, was mandatorily pushed into hospitals. They met small outbreaks with hard local lockdowns, foreign travelers were put in compulsory quarantine, and suspected cases were kept under long isolation. But they eased later some of these measures to enable irate people to buy essential items.
Because of these harsh measures, China could officially control the pandemic. In the last two years since March 2020, it reported barely 30,000 cases. Even now, the total number of cases detected in China since the beginning of the pandemic is only about 1.5 lakh. China has not announced many deaths. Last week, it reported two deaths, the first coronavirus deaths in over a year. The total reported death toll in China was 4,638, and only six of these deaths occurred after the middle of April 2020.
They attributed many deaths in Hong Kong to low vaccination rates in the elderly population of the city. Only about a third of those above the age of 80 years in Hong Kong were fully vaccinated, and 90 percent of those who died were not fully vaccinated.
While the overall vaccination rate in China is over 85 percent, only about 20 percent of the people above 80 years of age had received the primary shot and the booster dose.
China is concerned that should the situation in Shanghai, which accounts for almost three-fourths of all cases in the country, goes out of hand, as happened in many countries in the last month, it could cause many deaths of elderly people as seen in Hong Kong.
The lockdown in Shanghai, even at the risk of a major economic impact, is a desperate attempt to prevent a Hong Kong-like situation, the reports said.
China’s neighbor South Korea has also reported a spike in infections. This month, Seoul reported 6 to 8 lakh infections daily, which is more than what it had detected in the entire pandemic period until the end of 2021. Even on Wednesday, it reported about 4.24 lakh infections.