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For the nearly three years that the world has grappled with Covid-19, China has stood out from the pack for its “zero Covid” policies that locked down residents for months at a time, stoking public anger and hammering its economy.
Now that it’s loosened many of those rules, the country is getting hit with a Covid wave that, for the rest of us, brings back shades of 2020.
While official case counts have been falling in Chinese cities, that drop reflects a significant rollback of testing. Reports suggest that Covid is ripping through the population right now, forcing businesses to close and straining a medical system that’s not equipped to handle a surge in Covid patients. Visits to fever clinics spiked 16x from the previous week.
An adviser on China’s Covid task force recently predicted that the upcoming Covid wave could infect 60% of residents. Given that China has a population of 1.4 billion, that means 840 million people could get Covid in the coming weeks.
Why will Covid spread so quickly? China’s population has low immunity to the virus. Due to Beijing’s Covid clampdown, many people haven’t been infected at all. And the government has refused to import effective mRNA vaccines from Western countries, instead relying on domestic jabs. The country’s elderly are especially susceptible: One-third of citizens 60 and over haven’t gotten a third, Omicron-specific shot.