China is Trapped in its Ineffective and Brutally Enforced "Zero COVID" Policy
It is unclear if Beijing has any plan to move away from the "Zero COVID" policy and recognize that COVID19 is here to stay
China was the first country to experience the COVID19 outbreak in 2020. Two years later, although many countries have lifted their COVID19 restrictions and gradually returned life to normal, China continues to be trapped in its ineffective and often brutally enforced "Zero COVID" policy, unable to find an off-ramp.
On January 23, 2020, after initial delay and cover-ups of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China announced the lockdown of Wuhan and three other nearby cities, with a total population of 60 million people. Even though Beijing declared its victory over COVID19 as early as March 19, it has continued to impose a "Zero-COVID" policy, relying on mandatory testing, quarantines, and border control to practically completely isolate the entire nation from the rest of the world.
As of August 25, 2020, COVID19 infected over 5.9 million Americans, and about 183,198 patients lost their lives. Yet, China, which has a population more than three times that of the United States, insisted that its number of infections was only 84,996, and the number of deaths was 4,634. Beijing credited its "Zero COVID" policy for keeping the nation's COVID19 cases numbers and death tolls low, while other countries struggled to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
Although many people have no confidence in the accuracy of China's official COVID19 statistics, some in the west bought Beijing's lies and praised how the pandemic "has fully demonstrated the superiority of Chinese governance... that the Chinese model is the only 'successful" response to COVID19."
Chinese scientists rushed out COVID19 vaccines as early as June 2020. The Chinese government imposed a vaccine mandate in December 2020, even though these made-in-China vaccines had gone through limited clinical trials and had reported a low efficacy rate. For example, China's SinoVac has an efficacy of 51%, barely above the World Health Organization's threshold of minimum 50% efficacy for emergency authorization.
Still, to reach Chinese leader Xi's goal of getting 80% of the Chinese population vaccinated by October last year, local authorities deployed extreme coercive measures, including having police dragging unvaccinated people to the hospital and forcibly injecting COVID19 vaccines without the patients' consent.
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