No clear exit strategy from zero-Covid isolation
TWO weeks after Shanghai finally began reopening – after a Covid-induced lockdown that lasted far longer than expected – things are once more looking grim for China’s financial hub.
Even as city officials have been trying to restore foreign firms’ confidence, with a slew of business meetings planned this month, Shanghai began locking down several districts last week to conduct mass testing.
As the tension between Shanghai’s international orientation and China’s zero-tolerance pandemic policy continues, it seems inevitable that the latter will take precedence. China appears to be in no rush to ease off its zero-Covid stance, and recently doubled down on defending it.
At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore over the weekend, China’s defence minister Wei Fenghe praised his country’s pandemic approach as having been a major contribution to global efforts.
In earlier stages of the pandemic, China’s uncompromisingly strict approach did succeed in limiting case numbers and deaths.
Yet as circumstances change, so should policies. Vaccination has decreased the severity of Covid-19 outcomes, while the virus itself has mutated to become both more transmissible and less deadly.
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Some early prevention efforts, such as mass disinfection of surfaces, have also proven less relevant as more is known about how the virus spreads.
The most obvious and perplexing incongruities are probably “hygiene theatre” efforts such as spraying down empty roads and disinfecting the homes of quarantined citizens.
But a zero-Covid policy itself has become increasingly incongruous, and impossible to uphold without continued isolation.
Granted, elsewhere in the world, political considerations and questions of optics have arguably outweighed public health considerations in the opposite direction.
One could easily criticise some governments for dropping mask requirements too early or too broadly, or for being insufficiently zealous or rigorous in their vaccination drives.
Yet that does not mean that the other extreme is reasonable. At some point, the financial, societal, and human costs of a zero-Covid policy – including lives lost amid the lockdown, due to causes other than Covid-19 – will far outweigh the lives saved by it.
The question is whether these hard calculations will prove sufficient to overcome political reluctance.
The longer that China adheres to its zero-Covid stance, and the more strongly and repeatedly it trumpets the importance thereof, the more difficult it becomes to eventually step back.
The problem with a zero-Covid policy is that there appears to be no feasible exit strategy, in a world dominated by the Omicron variant and in which many major economies have moved towards living with the virus. And, one can be sure, there will be new variants to come, as the novel coronavirus continues to mutate and evolve.
Instead, multinational corporations, expatriates, and even some citizens themselves, will be making an exit.
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