China has put another major city on lockdown in response to a surge in COVID infections. This can greatly affect the entire world.
This is because Shenzhen, a city of 12.6 million adjacent to Hong Kong in southeast China, is a major electronics manufacturing hub. Factories in Shenzhen produce smartphones and tablets, as well as computer chips that are vital components for a host of other products, including cars.
The lockdown in Shenzhen, the result of China’s strict and controversial “COVID zero” policy, is a useful reminder that despite the lifting of many pandemic-related restrictions in the US and Europe, the pandemic is not over yet. “Anyone who thinks we’re past COVID should rethink,” Irvin Redlener, founding director of Columbia University’s National Disaster Preparedness Center, told The Daily Beast.
It is also a reminder of the deep wounds that the new coronavirus — and the government’s reflex response to the virus — can still inflict 27 months after the pandemic began. The Shenzhen lockdown could further block global supply chains that have already been hit by COVID and the war in Ukraine. Experts warn that shortages and price increases are possible.
Impacts on supply chains are not inevitable. At least one major manufacturer is already finding workarounds. And the Chinese government could help the industry by adding flexibility to its zero COVID rules.
In the long term, local authorities in Shenzhen could work harder to vaccinate their residents and mitigate future outbreaks. Officials in Beijing could help by allowing the most effective Western-made vaccines to be used in addition to locally produced vaccines.
That said, it is important not to exaggerate the scale of the outbreak in Shenzhen. Daily new cases peaked at just 139 on March 13, the same day local authorities announced a week-long ban on non-essential travel and closed many businesses.
The BA.2 sub-variant of the dominant Omicron variant appears to be the culprit. BA.2 may be the most transmissible variant of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen, having undergone many major mutations over the past two years.
BA.2 is steadily becoming the dominant strain of COVID worldwide and could cause new waves of infections in countries that are just starting to recover from the previous wave of Omicron. Several European countries are reporting spikes in infections. And US wastewater experts have spotted ominous signs of a possible BA.2 wave in the coming weeks.
Employees work at the RELX electronic cigarette factory of Shenzhen Wuxin Technology Co Ltd on September 23, 2021 in Shenzhen, China.
VCG via Getty
Of course, a few hundred cases in a city of nearly 13 million people are not statistically significant. It is worth noting that health officials in Shenzhen have not yet reported any deaths from the current spike in cases.
However, the government does not take risks. Authorities weighed the risk of a wider outbreak against the potential economic downturn that could result from a week-long pause in electronics production and decided to prioritize public health.
“It will be very bad.”
This is in line with China’s longstanding no-COVID-19 policy, which also led to major restrictions in Hong Kong during the city’s first major COVID-19 outbreak last month.
Paul Anant Tambya, president of the Asia-Pacific Society for Clinical Microbiology and Infection in Singapore, said Chinese leaders are doing what they think is best for the Chinese people. “I think the Chinese have seen the devastating impact of the partial lockdowns, as well as the increased number of cases straining healthcare systems around the world, so they might think it’s worth giving the COVID zero strategy a chance to prove if it’s really possible. nip the outbreak of such a virus in the bud.”
But economists and supply chain experts have reacted with dismay to the lockdown. “Things are going to get really bad,” Daniel Stanton, a professor of marketing at Bradley University, told Fortune. “When we talk about goods coming from China, it’s not just about finished products that we buy directly, but also about a lot of parts that are critical to the production of other things that we buy.”
The possible impact of a citywide lockdown on supply chains is just one reason many experts are skeptical of China’s COVID-free approach to dealing with the pandemic. Allowing industries to remain open with targeted restrictions such as the mandatory use of masks and vaccines could better balance public health and economic health.
Another major reason experts criticize the COVID zero spread strategy is that it doesn’t always work very well. Locking down an entire city while the virus is raging around protects residents in the short term, but also prevents anyone from gaining natural immunity from a past infection. When some dastardly variant finally slips into the city – which is almost inevitable – there is no natural immunity to slow its spread.
At this point, only further restrictions – or vaccines – can mitigate the impact of the virus.
Unfortunately, however, the vaccination campaign in China has failed, leaving lockdowns as the only last resort against rapid transmission of the virus. Nationwide, more than 80 percent of Chinese people are fully vaccinated against COVID, but vaccination rates vary by community.
For example, only two-thirds of Hong Kong residents are fully vaccinated. And only every fifth inhabitant of this city returned to the local clinic for revaccination. Tax rates in neighboring Shenzhen may be the same.
Cargo containers stacked at the port of Yantian in Shenzhen in China’s southern province of Guangdong in 2021.
STR/AFP via Getty
“Currently, vaccination coverage for older people in mainland China is also not as high,” Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong, told The Daily Beast.
There are hundreds of millions of Chinese people who are completely unvaccinated, and hundreds of millions more who should be vaccinated, but they haven’t and are losing their immunity. It is these unvaccinated and under-vaccinated people who are most at risk. Cowling has calculated that 85 percent of Hong Kong’s recent COVID deaths have occurred among residents who have never had injections.
It doesn’t help that the government in Beijing has only sanctioned Chinese “killed virus” vaccines that work by exposing a person to a weakened form of SARS-CoV-2. These two-dose vaccines, while safe, are widely considered to be less effective than the leading messenger RNA vaccines developed in the US and Europe.
It is not clear why Beijing refuses to allow Western vaccines. Amesh Adalya, a public health expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, ventured a guess. “In the early days of the pandemic, China was critical of mRNA vaccines, questioning their own traditional vaccines,” Adalya told The Daily Beast. “This proves that politics, not science, is involved.”
In any case, it is clear that greater access to better vaccines will give local authorities and business leaders more options to deal with outbreaks without having to resort to plant closures.
“If it were possible to increase vaccination coverage for the elderly, I think there would be relatively less reason to continue with a zero COVID strategy, given the social and economic impacts of public health measures,” Cowling said.
However, some industries have found ways to get around the zero COVID policy and get around it without even having better access to better hits. Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that manufactures Apple’s iPhones and iPads in Shenzhen and other cities, announced Wednesday that it has resumed production in Shenzhen.
The company took advantage of a loophole in the citywide non-essential travel ban. Because many of its workers live on the same campuses where the factories are located, workers can walk to work without using trains and buses that are currently idle and without violating rules against non-essential travel.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If enough companies find ways to keep factories running, it’s possible that the Shenzhen lockdown will end without further major disruption. Store shelves may remain stocked. Inflation may not get worse.
But while the novel coronavirus is still with us, and China chooses to lock down entire cities to slow its spread, there is still a risk of future blows to the global economy as vast countries respond to outbreaks without deploying the best tool to suppress the virus: a vaccine. Especially the best mRNA vaccines.
“The ‘COVID-zero’ policy is increasingly being superseded by more contagious options, more asymptomatic cases and the public’s unwillingness to comply,” Adlaja told The Daily Beast. “It is not clear why the Chinese government is pursuing an unsustainable “Zero COVID” policy, which, given the infection is always doomed to endemic, will never be a long-term solution and will require authoritarian dumb tools.”