Roving Periscope: Curbs gone, now China may face over two million Covid-19 deaths in 2023
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: For the first time since 1949, Communist-ruled China briefly became a ‘People’s Republic’ in November when, under extreme pressure because of the widespread protests against the Zero Covid policy across the country, it suddenly lifted brutal tactics to keep the potential and real pandemic victims behind doors.
But this has opened another can of worms: now the world’s second-largest economy faces the grim prospects of Covid-19 waves in 2023 which can claim over two million lives, the media reported on Tuesday.
Beijing had adopted the barbaric Zero Covid policy because they found its indigenously developed vaccines inadequate to treat Covid-19 patients of later variants of coronavirus. The government, which exported these ‘substandard’ vaccines to countries like Pakistan and others, did not, however, want to import effective vaccines—as it would have exposed its own incompetence—and had to rely upon, instead, implementing a brutal policy to keep the people away from the pandemic. This strategy continued for about two years.
But, as other countries gradually lifted curbs and reopened in 2021 and 2022, the Chinese people became restive and launched unprecedented mass movements in November demanding an end to the Communist rule and President Xi Jinping’s sacking. Worried, China relented but its abrupt end to the Zero-Covid policy raised concerns of widespread infections among a vulnerable, under-vaccinated population with little natural immunity. This would overload the health system and result in up to two million deaths, or more, various research groups have reported.
New analyses by various modeling groups predict the reopening could cause 2.1 million deaths.
As of Monday, Beijing had officially reported only 5,242 Covid-related deaths during the pandemic years (2020-22), a tiny fraction of its 1.4 billion population, while the global toll soured to over 6.67 million since January 2020.
According to the media reports, Zhou Jiatong, Head of the Centers for Disease Control in the southwestern Guangxi region, said last month in a paper published by the Shanghai Journal of Preventive Medicine that mainland China faces over two million deaths if it loosened Covid-19 curbs in the same way Hong Kong did this year. And, his forecast showed, infections could rise to over 233 million.
In May, scientists in China and the United States estimated that the Asian giant risks over 1.5 million Covid-19 deaths if it drops its tough Zero-Covid policy with no safeguards such as ramping up vaccination and access to treatments, according to research published in Nature Medicine.
They forecasted that peak demand for intensive care would be over 15 times capacity, causing roughly 1.5 million deaths, based on worldwide data gathered about the virus variant’s severity.
However, these researchers, including the lead authors from Fudan University in China, said they could reduce sharply the death toll if the government focused on vaccination.
If China lifts its Zero Covid policy, it could see 1.3 million to 2.1 million people die because of low vaccination and booster rates and a lack of hybrid immunity, British scientific information, and analytics company Airfinity said in late November. It modeled its data on Hong Kong’s BA.1 wave in February, which occurred after the city eased restrictions after two years.
The U.S.-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), part of the University of Washington, in an updated model said on Friday last week it expects over one million deaths in China through 2023. The group expects cases to peak in April when deaths will have reached 322,000.
About a third of China’s population will have been infected by then, IHME Director Christopher Murray said.
A modeling team at the University of Hong Kong estimated simultaneous reopening of all provinces in December 2022 through January 2023 would cause 684 deaths per million, according to a paper released on Wednesday on the Medrxiv preprint server that has yet to undergo peer review.
Based on China’s population of 1.41 billion, and without measures such as a mass vaccination booster campaign, that amounts to 964,400 deaths.
