On the menu today: It’s understandable if you never want to read another word about Covid-19 again, but while the U.S. has the pandemic in its rear-view mirror, the Omicron variant has arrived in China and Hong Kong, and the Chinese government, following its “zero Covid” philosophy, is trying to deal with a super-contagious variant by locking down anyplace it appears. As you can imagine, it’s not going well — and perhaps illustrating that as frustrating and flawed as the U.S. response to Covid-19 was, a “zero covid” approach just delays the problem instead of stopping it.
Covid-19, Now an Afterthought in America, Is Shutting Down China
It is arguably the biggest story in the world that you’re hearing very little about: China, which for much of the past two years held itself up as a Covid-19 success story for enacting a “zero Covid” policy, is now dealing with an explosion of cases and is trying to stop a virus as contagious as the common cold through lockdowns — with predictably bad results.
There is growing concern in Shanghai, where health officials in the city of about 25 million people reported 1,609 cases on Friday. Just over 1,500 cases were asymptomatic, marking a sharp increase from the previous day’s 979.
Shanghai’s authorities have resisted going into city-wide lockdown, a harsh measure still being used in other provinces, and are instead closing individual buildings and communities for testing. But some residents have claimed they’ve been locked down for far longer than warned, and others reported issues in securing fresh food and other deliveries. . . .
On Wednesday a nurse in Shanghai died after she was denied entry to hospitals after suffering an asthma attack, echoing the cases of people who died during a lockdown in Xi’an last year after they were denied medical care because of overly strict Covid policies.
It takes a particular kind of genius to respond to a public-health crisis by denying people access to hospitals. This is like fighting arsonists by shutting down firehouses.
From overwhelmed hospitals to overflowing morgues, the scenes from Hong Kong’s COVID-19 crisis were strikingly similar to those that unfolded around the world in the early months of the pandemic.
Except that for the wealthy city of 7.5 million people, the sight of bodies piling up in hallways and around patients in hospitals emerged only this month, a year after vaccines against the virus became widely and freely available in the territory. . . .
In a matter of weeks, the contagious Omicron variant of the virus has infected more than 1 million people and caused more than 5,000 deaths, mostly among unvaccinated, elderly people.
This detail is just jaw-dropping: “More than 70 percent of Hong Kong’s COVID-19 fatalities were people aged 80 and older, many of whom lived in elderly care homes. The same age group was the least vaccinated at the outset of the current wave of infections, with less than one in five people fully vaccinated.”
Somehow, Hong Kong authorities failed to vaccinate the demographic that is most likely to succumb to Covid-19:
At the time of writing, 78 percent of people aged 12 years and older in Hong Kong had received both doses of the vaccine. But less than a third of those over the age of 80 years had been fully vaccinated. When omicron hit Hong Kong, the proportion of fully vaccinated residents of care homes was under 20 percent.
“I am very disappointed that despite having early, privileged, and sustained access to the COVID-19 vaccines, we still have this large vulnerable group that remains sub-optimally covered”, commented Gabriel Leung, dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong. The fifth wave of COVID-19 has already killed more than 2000 people in Hong Kong. An analysis of the first 1153 deaths revealed that 92 percent of the deceased had not received both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.”
Shenyang — an industrial base home to factories, including car-maker BMW — reported 47 new cases on Tuesday as authorities put all housing compounds under “closed management” and barred residents from leaving without a 48-hour negative test result.
During the worst months of the pandemic, many U.S. health-care and hospital workers felt like they were being worked to death. In Shandong, it is apparently literally true:
On Tuesday, a state-media report said the state-sponsored All-China Women’s Federation had posthumously awarded a badge of honor to a woman who died after working for 11 days straight at a hospital in Shandong province, including seven night shifts. The woman, 42-year-old Bai Xiaohui, who led a Covid-testing team, collapsed Sunday as she came off a shift, the federation said, describing her as a model worker. After the state-media report was posted on social media, one commenter said, “Please give medical workers more time to rest while they are alive.”
And the Chinese government is expecting similar waves of cases nationwide:
China’s provinces should set up at least two to three temporary hospitals each to treat Covid-19 patients, Beijing said on Tuesday (March 22), a potential sign the country is anticipating an increase in cases as it battles an Omicron outbreak and ponders how to exit its isolationist virus strategy.
As usual, it is exceptionally difficult for outsiders to get a clear picture of how bad the outbreak is. The official Chinese statistics would have you believe that only two people died of Covid-19 in that country in the entire year of 2021 — in a country with 1.4 billion people. Since the start of the pandemic, China’s official statistics suggest that “when adjusted for population size, China has reported fewer deaths than any other country in the world except Burundi.”
Entirely coincidentally, the Chinese mortality rate of deaths per 1,000 inhabitants jumped from 7.07 in 2020 to 7.18 in 2021, and an analysis by The Economist calculates that since the start of the pandemic, China has had 280,000 to 430,000 more deaths than they would expect to have.
As we’ve all learned during the past two years, it is really tough to “stop the spread” of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Human beings want and need to interact with other human beings, and it’s unrealistic to expect people to stay in their homes and minimize their interactions with others for months at a time. And once a virus gets as contagious as the Omicron variant, it’s just about impossible to stop. A new study determined that Omicron patients can shed the virus from six to eight days. In this case, the mildness of many Omicron infections may work against preventing the spread; people walk around and interact with each other longer before realizing they feel sick. Back in December, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said, “Early in the course of illness, in the one to two days prior to the onset of symptoms and in the two to three days after the prior onset of symptoms is really when the vast majority of transmission occurs.”
For a while, people pointed to Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand as Covid success stories — and some of us observed that those countries had mostly taught us that it is easier to quarantine an island than a country with land borders.
“Zero Covid” policies can delay a country’s encounter with the virus, but they can’t stop it. As frustrating, flawed, and stumbling as the U.S. response to Covid-19 was, the strategy was sound: Minimize your risk of exposure until a vaccine is developed, particularly if you’re old, immunocompromised, or have comorbidities; once a vaccine is available, get your shots and get your immune system primed and trained for a run-in with SARS-CoV-2; get additional boosters as needed. Once you’ve got the shots, your run-in with Covid-19 is likely to feel like a winter cold, and then you’ll have natural immunity on top of your vaccine immunity.
Unsurprisingly, the Chinese people are noticing that two years after the pandemic started, they’re still getting their cities shut down, while the rest of the world — having endured two years of fits and starts and several waves — is generally moving on and returning to normal:
In the tech hub of Shenzhen on Sunday, videos shared online showed residents protesting in a locked-down district, after restrictions lasted for several days longer than scheduled, according to social media posts.
“You can’t do this — we need to eat and pay the rent,” a man among a crowd of protesters is heard yelling in anguish at health care workers, who stood behind high plastic barriers, according to a video shared online.
“Unlock! We demand lifting the lockdown!” others shouted in a second clip.
In another instance, in the neighboring city of Guangzhou earlier this month, thousands of people were seen in video footage trying to escape being caught up in a snap lockdown at a trade fair. Some hopped fences to avoid being locked inside the venue after a single positive case was found.
The other complication for China is that Chinese-manufactured vaccines didn’t seem as effective against the original strains of SARS-CoV-2 as other countries’ vaccines; the early evidence suggests that the Chinese vaccines are even less against effective against Omicron.
A Yale study concluded that: “An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine. Antibody levels against omicron rose among those who had also received a booster shot of the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech.” And a study “by Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine found that a booster shot of Sinopharm produced significantly lower antibodies against omicron, compared with the protection it provided for the variant discovered in Wuhan in early 2020.”
Then again, from the holiday season until a few weeks ago, lots of Americans learned that being fully vaccinated and boosted didn’t prevent you from having symptomatic Covid-19 when you encountered the Omicron variant; the vaccines just made the effects milder.
Thankfully, this doesn’t mean that China will experience an overwhelming number of deaths; Omicron is still milder than other strains. British researchers have calculated that “after adjusting for a number of factors, the risk of hospital admission for Omicron cases was found to be less than half (59 percent lower) compared to the risk for Delta cases. The risk of dying was 69 percent lower for those with Omicron compared to those with Delta infections.” China is “lucky” in the sense that this outbreak is Omicron, not Delta, and if the Chinese circumstances are like those in the U.S., they’re all Omicron; the last significant recording of Delta variant cases was back on January 29.
But the experience of China in recent weeks should pour even more cold water on the “China showed the world how to respond to the pandemic” narrative.
ADDENDUM: A fascinating assertion: David Axe of Forbes looks at the confirmed number of destroyed Ukrainian tanks, and the number of Russian tanks confirmed captured by the Ukrainians, and calculates that, “The Ukrainian army might actually have more tanks now than a month ago — all without building a single brand-new tank or pulling some older vehicle out of storage.”