China’s Forever War Against Covid-19

In the succeeding months, these themes would get together and have a baby: The world would likely have to make peace with a fast-spreading virus that mostly causes mild disease, and so would China.

And yet so far China hasn’t, and the reason has been mostly overlooked. China has nothing like the critical-care facilities of Western cities. In dozens of sprawling metropolises larger than any in the West, China would be faced with millions more severely ill and dying people than it could possibly care for. An early study found the original Wuhan outbreak, if repeated in the U.S., would require 26 intensive-care beds per 100,000 citizens. The U.S. had these beds. China didn’t and still doesn’t.

And yet one irony of the leadership’s decision to treat zero Covid as a national triumph has been a slowness to expand hospital capacity. Its go-it-alone approach on vaccine development, another supposed triumph, has saddled China with inferior vaccines against Omicron and Delta. It continues strangely to emphasize Chinese traditional medicine, which Xi Jinping calls a “national treasure,” as a treatment for Covid. The Beijing city government even pushed rules to make it a crime to “slander” traditional treatments. China’s pandemic diplomacy, from Belarus and Malta to Pakistan and even the World Health Organization, has focused on promoting traditional nostrums against Covid-19.

Most notoriously, instead of freeing scientists to understand the virus’s origins, China’s propaganda has promoted tall tales about it arriving on imported food or packages. Now this is blowing back in an ironic way. With the central government increasingly blaming local officials for any zero-Covid failures, Beijing city officials turned the tables by saying a pre-Olympic outbreak was caused by overseas mail, a central-government responsibility. China’s postal service thereupon issued fruitless orders to sanitize all incoming mail and urged citizens to refrain from eating imported frozen foods. A spate of cases in Hangzhou was soon blamed on a U.S. company that makes food-processing equipment.

That Beijing chose to proceed with the Olympics at all (and, yes, the opening ceremonies were spectacular) was a choice forced by the Covid success story China was selling its own people and the world.

How badly could this go wrong in a country that has experienced impressively few Covid deaths? Omicron is believed to produce milder disease but a billion-plus Chinese presumably lack any of the natural immunity Western populations enjoy. Their government hasn’t allowed them to benefit from Western mRNA vaccines. Recall the catastrophic rampage of Delta through India last year, a country with similarly dense cities and similarly spartan healthcare, but whose population is 10 years younger than China’s (the Chinese age structure is similar to the U.S. in percentage of vulnerable older people).

Naturally, the Communist Party won’t let anything like India’s disaster happen, but the only seeming alternative is ever more stringent, oppressive attempts to suppress outbreaks while racing belatedly to fix its vaccine problems and bring its healthcare up to snuff. Shanghai, with 26 million people, was recently warned by a leading virologist to prepare for “hundreds” of cases. This won’t cut it. Propaganda is revving up again on the benefits of traditional cures. This won’t cut it either.

The end is not nigh for China’s zero-Covid experiment, however much some hope for a change after next autumn’s party congress. Australia is the nearest parallel, having shifted from zero Covid to “living with” the virus. Australia has a political system that allows for regime change; its voters can select scapegoats for the surging cases and deaths now challenging its health care system. The Communist Party has no such mechanism. Disease surveillance is rapidly mutating into dissent surveillance. China’s economy, which helped keep the world supplied with manufactured goods during its Covid fight, is now becoming a drag on the global recovery because of domestic lockdowns. Look for China’s propaganda to become even more militant in trying to portray Covid as a foreign conspiracy.

In case you’re wondering, the balance of that column 24 months ago was devoted to a question important for the future: why China, with its peasant agriculture and later its urban wet markets, has long been the primary source of new flu-like pandemics.