China appears to be losing the battle to contain COVID-19, but is not yet ready to admit defeat.
Facing the worst national outbreak since the first wave of the pandemic, authorities have imposed lockdown restrictions in cities across the country, with production lines idle at the Shenzhen technology hub and offices closing in the financial capital of Shanghai.
Under President Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has maintained a strict zero-COVID policy since the virus emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, locking down entire cities whenever cases arise and using mass testing and strict quarantines to bring local outbreaks under control.
But Chinese virologists say the emergence of the Omicron variant and its new “invisible” sub-variant – both of which appear to evade China’s Sinovac vaccine – could leave that policy in tatters.
For those living in the Americas or Europe, the number of cases reported in China still seems fairly small, with authorities confirming 1,337 new cases of local transmission in mainland China on Monday. In contrast, according to the main COVID tracker, the UK is currently reporting over 200,000 cases per day.
But the example of Hong Kong, a former British colony that is officially semi-autonomous, is troubling. Omicron appears to be spreading almost unhindered among the population of the island territory, where an average of 40,000 cases per day have been recorded over the past week, despite widespread vaccination.
The northeastern province of Jilin, which borders North Korea, has been hardest hit on the mainland, where many residents are confined to their homes except for grocery shopping trips every other day. Jilin has recorded more than 4,000 cases in the past two weeks.
But several smaller outbreaks have also been reported. Shenzhen, a city of 17.5 million that borders Hong Kong, reported 66 new cases on Saturday, prompting authorities to suspend public transport and close factories, including the massive Foxconn plant that makes the Apple iPhone. Residents have been told to stay at home for the next week, except when called in for three rounds of mandatory testing.
Zhang Wenhong, a well-known infectious disease expert from Shanghai, said in an article for Chinese business publication Caixin that the outbreak was caused by an “invisible” sub-variant of Omicron BA.2, the most contagious transmission line of the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
Zhang, whose outspoken calls for people to come to terms with quarantine restrictions early in the pandemic made him a prominent figure, said the number of cases indicated the start of an “exponential rise” but China had no choice but to try to contain the virus.
“If our country opens quickly now, it will cause a large number of human infections in a short period of time,” Zhang wrote, according to a translation published by the Associated Press. “No matter how low the death rate is, it will still cause a shortage of medical resources and a short-term shock to social life, causing irreparable harm to families and society.”
Foxconn, Apple’s manufacturing partner, said it would use its “diversified manufacturing sites in China” to minimize the impact of the Shenzhen lockdown.
But from a broader economic perspective, the lockdowns — both in Shenzhen and the industrial heartland of Dongguan — could hardly have come at a worse time. Panic sell-offs sent Hong Kong-listed Chinese tech stocks to fall 11 percent on Monday – their worst single-day drop since the 2008 crash – on wider fears that China could be dragged into the conflict. in Ukraine, or that Chinese companies doing business in Russia could face Western sanctions.
If China sticks to its zero-COVID policy despite the spread of Omicron, one option is to insist that manufacturers implement “closed management” systems in which workers live and work in a “COVID-free” bubble. The Chinese used such a system to protect last month’s Beijing Winter Olympics, where staff and volunteers wore hazmat suits to distribute and test visiting athletes and even robots to feed them. It will be more difficult to do this in a metropolis like Shenzhen or Shanghai.