Roving Periscope: As Beijing relaxes Zero Covid norms, the virus may now infect most Chinese
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Just a day after China relaxed the Zero Covid restrictions because of countrywide protests against the government’s policy, a senior health policy adviser warned that the vast majority of the country’s population may eventually contract the virus, the media reported on Thursday.
The warning came ahead of the next year’s Chinese New Year Day on January 22, 2023, when millions of holidaying people migrate within China to their native places and tourist centers across the country. In 2020 also, Covid-19 spread quickly across China after New Year’s Day they celebrated on January 25, 2020.
Only on Wednesday, Beijing announced concerted steps to dismantle its zero-tolerance approach to the virus and living with higher case levels because of recent outbreaks.
About 80 to 90 percent of the Chinese population may eventually get infected with the virus, according to the latest estimates of Feng Zijian, a former deputy chief at China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s going to be inevitable for most of us to get infected once, regardless of how the Covid-fighting measures are adjusted,” Feng said on Tuesday at an online meeting held by the Tsinghua University in Beijing.
Feng is currently advising China’s joint prevention and control task force on how to manage the pandemic. He was among the eight experts convened by Vice Premier Sun Chunlan last week when she hinted at relaxing the curbs and pledging small, consistent changes to optimize China’s approach to Covid-19.
According to the new warning, some 60 percent of Chinese people may be infected in the first wave, before the curve flattens. By comparison, about 58 percent of the US population had been infected by February 2022, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis said in April. That was up from 33.5 percent in December 2021.
Until a few days ago, Chinese officials continued to quash Covid-19 outbreaks and eliminate the virus. But countrywide protests against the stringent rules, with citizens taking to the streets in a swath of Chinese cities, might have forced China to relent and move away from a brutal policy adopted by the Xi Jinping-led Communist regime.
Feng’s warning came a day before the Wednesday announcement showing China shifting its stance from its long-held Zero Covid policies. Rattled with the unprecedented protests, worried officials are now easing many restrictions imposed even after the rest of the world moved toward living with the virus.
In the last few weeks, the National Health Commission set out 10 relaxations, followed by the government declaring another 20 guidelines to relax curbs.
According to government claims, its Zero Covid policy avoided one million deaths and 50 million illnesses. Since 2020, China reported less than 6,000 deaths from Covid-19 on the mainland, mostly early in the pandemic, vis-à-vis about one million deaths in the US which has a population of less than a quarter the Chinese size.
China has used its official figures to portray its system of governance as superior.
Currently, the country is reporting over 20,000 new cases a day, as fresh outbreaks flare across the length and breadth of the country. In contrast, the country reported less than 100 infections a day in June, and zero for long periods of 2020.
