Over the past week, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government has initiated a dangerous policy shift away from the Zero-COVID elimination strategy that has been in place across China since the pandemic began.
The clearest evidence of this change is the publication last Friday of 20 measures by the National Health Commission (NHC) which restrict all aspects of the Zero-COVID policy, in conditions where new daily cases have increased more than tenfold. since late October. According Our world in datathe seven-day average of new daily cases in China now stands at 15,897 and is on track to hit a record high next week.
The 20 measures include reduced mass testing protocols, restrictions on localities’ ability to impose lockdowns, shortened quarantine times for close contacts of people infected with COVID-19, easing travel restrictions to and within China, end contact tracing for secondary contacts, and more.
Despite a week-long surge of cases in Guangzhou, authorities have refrained from implementing a citywide lockdown, and rising waves in other major cities across the country have failed to trigger a lockdown. for the first time since Wuhan’s initial lockdown began on January 23. 2020.
The 20 measures also included promises to speed up vaccination programs, build health care infrastructure and stockpile medicines, clearly in anticipation of a nationwide spike in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. On Thursday, senior NHC official Guo Yanhong announced that the country would build more hospitals specializing in the treatment of moderate and severe COVID patients, while ensuring that intensive care units account for 10% of all beds. of hospitals.
The 20 measures were announced a day after Chinese President Xi Jinping held a meeting on the pandemic with his new Politburo standing committee, the first since the conclusion of the 20th CPC Congress on October 23.
At this Congress, Xi presented the fallacy of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” distorting the reality that the restoration of capitalism has produced vast growth in social inequality and class tension in China. In early 2020, fearing a social revolution amid a spiraling public health crisis, the CCP first implemented Zero-COVID in order to prevent the collapse of the country’s health care system and maintain the national stability.
Despite the immense importance of China’s Zero-COVID policy, which for more than two years has saved millions of lives and proven that elimination is possible, the nationalist basis of this policy has always rendered it unsustainable at long term. Just as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is a nationalist illusion, sustaining Zero-COVID in one country is impossible. By lifting this policy, Chinese society is now directly confronting “COVID with imperialist characteristics”.
For more than two years, US imperialism has exerted relentless pressure on China to lift its Zero-COVID policy as part of its broader efforts to militarily encircle and subjugate the country. Countless columns have been published denouncing China’s public health policies for their impact on corporate profits, demanding that they be removed regardless of the cost in human lives.
Over the past year, China has been repeatedly bombarded by the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron variant, which evolved in 2021 due to the unhindered spread of the virus outside the country. Last spring, the Omicron BA.2 subvariant caused the largest wave of infections in China to date, centered in Shanghai. After that surge was successfully suppressed, itself a public health triumph, smaller waves hit different parts of the country almost continuously, straining testing capacity in many cities.
Efforts to maintain Zero-COVID have become increasingly costly, with the World Bank predicting in late September that China’s GDP growth will decline by more than 5% this year.
It appears a tipping point was reached when Apple threatened to move production out of China after a major outbreak of COVID-19 at the notorious Foxconn sweatshop in Zhengzhou, the world’s largest iPhone factory. , which severely disrupted production ahead of the peak holiday shopping season. By lifting Zero-COVID, the CCP is clearly seeking to reintegrate into the global economy and fully restore capitalist production, symbolized by Xi’s maskless participation in the G20 summit this week.
The full implications of lifting Zero-COVID will become apparent in the weeks and months to come. It is clear that the CCP has not yet adopted the policy of “herd immunity” against mass infections that has been universally adopted in the West, and its current policy could now be described as the strictest possible mitigation strategy. .
However, the objective laws of viral transmission are implacable and the situation could quickly spiral out of control. Any abandonment of a Zero-COVID elimination strategy carries the potential for monumental catastrophe. In this regard, the experiences of New Zealand and Hong Kong over the past year best illustrate the dangers ahead.
In Hong Kong, which is densely populated and comparable to conditions in most major Chinese cities, the lifting of Zero-COVID last February quickly caused a spike in infections that led to the highest daily death toll per capita. never seen in the world since the start of the pandemic. Due to relatively low vaccination rates among the elderly, in the space of three months Hong Kong has gone from just 213 deaths to 9,346, a cumulative death toll per capita about half that of the United States, where more than 1.1 million Americans have been killed by COVID -19.
In New Zealand, repeated waves of infection have flooded hospitals and given the country one of the highest per capita death rates in the world for much of this year. Since November 2021, the country’s death toll has risen from just 31 to 2,154.
Worryingly, conditions in China are closer to Hong Kong than New Zealand. In Shanghai, only 71% of people aged 60 and over received two doses of the vaccine and only 46% received a third booster dose, and comparable figures exist in many other cities. Most of the Chinese population has been vaccinated with the CoronaVac vaccine, which has been shown to be less effective than mRNA vaccines in preventing hospitalization and death.
If the situation in mainland China spirals out of control, it would be a world historic tragedy. China has 1.4 billion people, one-sixth of the world’s population. A study published in May found that if Omicron were allowed to spread freely in China, in just six months there would likely be 112 million symptomatic cases, 5.1 million hospital admissions, 2.7 million intensive care admissions and 1.6 million deaths. Real-world outcomes could be much worse than predicted by this model, especially given the evolution of even more infectious and immune-resistant variants over the past six months.
Beyond the acute crisis during the initial surge, Chinese society would also face the long-term ramifications of chronic post-viral illness. In the United States alone, official figures indicate that at least 20 million Americans are now suffering from long-term sequelae known as Long COVID, which can cause a wide range of symptoms affecting nearly every organ in the body. Up to 4 million Americans are so severely disabled by Long COVID that they have left the workforce entirely.
Extrapolated to the Chinese population, if the “herd immunity” strategy pursued in the West is eventually adopted, more than 85 million Chinese could end up suffering from Long COVID, including more than 15 million completely disabled by the virus.
In lifting Zero-COVID, China will face mounting pressure to fully embrace the dystopian “forever COVID” policy pioneered in the United States and embraced by nearly all world governments, in which waves of infection without end will repeatedly re-infect ever-increasing sections of the population. in the foreseeable future. A recent study found that each reinfection with COVID-19 increases the risk of death, hospitalization and long COVID.
Whatever pragmatic economic and political considerations drive the CCP to lift Zero-COVID, the crisis it faces will by no means be resolved and may well worsen.
Depending on how quickly the virus spreads and begins to overwhelm hospital systems, the CCP may backtrack and attempt to reinstate the Zero-COVID policy. However, in the absence of a globally coordinated strategy, this will become increasingly difficult.
The lifting of Zero-COVID is a political issue facing the entire world population. Allowing the virus to spread through this immunologically naïve population could provide it with more than a billion new hosts in which it could still mutate and spawn new variants. This reactionary policy change in China therefore poses the need for workers internationally to renew their struggle against the policies of their own governments and to unify across national borders.
As the World Socialist Website has continuously stressed that the only way forward to stop the pandemic is for the international working class to take matters into their own hands and fight for a Zero-COVID global elimination strategy. This involves simultaneously deploying all available public health measures, as well as upgrading infrastructure to ensure every public space is free of harmful viruses and bacteria. The struggle for this program is inextricably linked to the struggle for global socialism, based on the prioritization of human needs above private profit.
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