HONG KONG, Nov 28 (Portal Breakingviews) – Protests across China underscore people’s growing fear that President Xi Jinping’s tough pandemic restrictions may remain in place. Unfortunately, two wasted years to vaccinate vulnerable groups and bolster hospital resources confirm these fears.
Since the start of the pandemic, infections and deaths in the People’s Republic have been kept to less than one per million people, yielding valuable political capital for Beijing despite the huge social and economic costs. Still, new daily cases hit over 40,000 on November 27. Cities, which account for 65% of the country’s GDP, have been under some sort of lockdown since Friday, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs.
Any end to the almost daily mandatory Covid tests and strict quarantine rules will be bumpy due to a huge unvaccinated population. As of November, about 27 million citizens aged 60 and over had not been bitten for Covid, Breakingviews calculated from official data, and another 36 million elderly have yet to receive their second dose. A May study by Chinese researchers predicted that uncontrolled spread of omicron over a six-month period would lead to a death rate of 1.1 per 1,000 people, nearly double the rate recorded in the United States from December 2021 to April 2022. Same Study found that demand for ICU beds in the above scenario would be a whopping 15.6 times China’s existing capacity.
The shortfall is partly because a significant chunk of tax revenue has gone to measures such as buying large quantities of tests, rather than improving healthcare infrastructure. National government spending on medicine and health care rose 22% to 1.75 trillion yuan ($243 billion) in the first 10 months of this year from the same period in 2019. Nomura estimates that if 90% of Chinese were required to test every other day, China could spend up to 2.3% of GDP on testing alone.
The construction and maintenance of quarantine facilities also need funding: in one case, a city in eastern Shandong Province has proposed issuing a bond dedicated to the cause, predicting that China’s Covid outbreaks will last at least another five years, according to Chinese media will last.
While healthcare capacity is tight in many countries around the world, Beijing’s political position so far means it has more to lose politically from deaths than other governments that have endured the pain of reopening. That limits China’s options.
China’s Covid-19 crisis: The government’s vaccination campaign has stalled this year
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CONTEXT NEWS
Hundreds of protesters in Shanghai shouted and jostled with police on Nov. 27 as protests against China’s tough Covid-19 restrictions flared for a third day after a deadly apartment fire in Xinjiang, Portal reported. The wave of civil disobedience has spread to other cities, including Beijing.
Officials in Urumqi, capital of China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, held a press conference in the early hours of November 26 to deny that Covid-19 measures had hampered the escape and rescue of residents amid a fire , which killed at least 10 people. Many of Urumqi’s 4 million residents have been under some of the country’s longest lockdowns, confined to their homes for up to 100 days, the Portal report said.
Edited by Robyn Mak and Katrina Hamlin
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Yawen Chen