Welcome to the Virus Briefing, your comprehensive guide to the latest news and expert analysis on the coronavirus pandemic and other outbreaks. |
 | | A Covid-19 testing booth in Beijing last month.Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times |
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More than 130 cities across nearly every province in China have reported cases, and nearly 200 million people in the country are currently in some form of lockdown as part of the country's zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19. And there are signs that the country's enormous and expensive testing regime, a cornerstone of the zero-tolerance approach, is coming under strain. |
Ahead of the congress on Sunday, I spoke to my colleague Keith Bradsher, the Beijing bureau chief. |
How is the party congress shaping up? |
China is already turning Beijing into a kind of Covid island for the party congress. In the last week, it has become extraordinarily difficult to enter the city. China tracks residents' P.C.R. tests and other health indicators with an app on residents' smartphones, and getting into any building or traveling requires showing that your health code is still green. But recently, residents of a very wide range of cities across the country have found that their health codes turn red or they receive a pop-up warning if they try to take a train or plane to Beijing. |
How will they be framing the Covid question at the Congress? |
Xi Jinping has framed the Covid question as a story of China putting its people's health first ahead of anything else, including sometimes even economic growth. The Communist Party is presenting itself as one of the few organizations on Earth that have managed to shield a country's people from widespread illness and deaths during the pandemic. And that portrayal of China's Covid-zero policies as a success is likely to endure at the party congress. |
Also important is that China has very little to worry about so far regarding long Covid. The U.S. has many millions of people who face lasting health problems, and that is an important cause of human suffering, as well as high costs for the health care system and lost productivity for the economy for a long time to come. In China, you scarcely hear of long Covid because few people have been infected yet. |
Will the congress give us any hints about what comes next for China's Covid policy? |
The drumbeat of statements in state media this week, reaffirming China's response to Covid, makes it unlikely the policy will change quickly. We are much more likely to hear of Covid zero as a success story with only the vaguest of mentions that there may be efforts to further improve the handling in the months to come. |
Party congresses are not an occasion for specific health policies. They are an occasion for the broadest of ideological statements, as well as for chest-thumping affirmations of national strength. We might eventually see incremental changes, however. |
For a real easing of restrictions, the political calendar and the public health calendar actually might match up rather well next spring and summer. That's when there tend to be fewer respiratory illnesses. And we are at the beginning of a very important political season in China that starts now, with a new Politburo named by the end of this month, and continues through mid-March, when a new cabinet will be named to oversee government ministries. Trying to change direction significantly on public health in the middle of that would really be a challenge. |
The other worry is that vaccination has really petered out here. |
At the peak, a year ago, China was doing 20 million to 30 million vaccines a day, and now it's a couple of million. A big chunk of the population has not had a vaccine in the past six months. And yet, with fewer than a million confirmed infections in the past three years, almost nobody has developed the antibodies from an illness, either. On top of that, China has refused to allow the import of foreign mRNA vaccines that have been proved in other countries to be far more effective than the older-technology Chinese vaccines. |
So the result is that you have a mostly unprotected population. If they want to open up, at a minimum they need to do a lot of vaccination. But they face, as in many places in the West, very strong public resistance and skepticism of vaccination. |
If the Chinese government can shut down cities and force people to be tested, can't they force people to get vaccines? |
Public opinion does count for something in China. And there is a lot of hesitancy about vaccines here. One reason is that China had a couple of scandals in the past decade preceding Covid involving routinely administered vaccines that were out of date or even contaminated. And that has produced a lingering suspicion. |
On top of that, when China first introduced its Covid vaccines in late 2020, it told older adults to be careful about getting these new, initially experimental vaccines, which created considerable vaccine hesitancy among that group. |
The city of Beijing a while back tried to start requiring that people be vaccinated in order to enter certain public venues. And they had to abandon the policy within a couple of days because of pushback from the general public. |
Have there been any changes to China's zero-Covid approach? |
There has not been that much change, and in the past couple days there has been an apparently coordinated barrage of articles in state media asserting that Covid-zero measures had worked. China continues to lock down entire cities, as they did a few weeks ago in Chengdu, a city with a population of 21 million. One city that had a single case but is now entirely locked down is Fenyang. China's willingness to lock down an entire city because of a single case shows how seriously they're taking this. |
But there have been a few tweaks at the margin. The most conspicuous has been to allow a modest increase in the number of international flights coming into the country and to shorten the government-run quarantine for people coming into the country. |
Could China keep the policy in place? |
Yes, but China is under a lot of economic pressure right now. Lightening up some more on Covid restrictions, so that people could at least walk out their front doors, would be a big step toward helping consumer spending on services. And prolonged economic weakness in China could really create problems in a lot of places outside of China as well. |
For example, it could hurt a lot of blue-collar communities in the West. It is hard for factories in Europe and the U.S. to compete with Chinese factories right now, because when Chinese factories have weak demand in their home market, they sell overseas at whatever low prices they can get, just to keep the factory gates open and keep the workers employed. |
China's economic weakness is making worse another big problem, which is the plight of developing countries. China is the main export market for a majority of the world's developing countries now, as China buys vast quantities of commodities. And as long as the Chinese economy is weak, that's going to hurt a lot of developing countries. |
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 | | Kristopher Radder/The Brattleboro Reformer, via Associated Press |
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F.D.A. clears updated booster for children |
The updated shot developed by Pfizer had been cleared for those 12 and older, while Moderna's updated booster was available only to those 18 and older. The F.D.A.'s action makes the Pfizer shot available to children as young as 5, and the Moderna shot to children as young as 6. |
The new boosters are authorized to be given at least two months after a child has completed the initial two-shot series or received a booster dose. |
Regulators authorized the shots for older age groups in late August, but only 13 million to 15 million Americans had received the updated shots through last weekend, according to White House estimates. Nearly 226 million people have received an initial round of vaccination, and more than 110 million have received at least one booster shot. |
What else we're following |
- New monkeypox cases have been falling and are likely to decline even further over the next few weeks, NPR reports.
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- The governor of New York extended the state's disaster emergency for polio after the virus was detected in wastewater in Brooklyn and Queens, CNBC reports.
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- Uganda's capital, Kampala, recorded the first death in its Ebola outbreak, the BBC reports.
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- The director general of the W.H.O. said that a clinical trial of vaccines to fight the strain of Ebola causing Uganda's outbreak could begin within weeks, Reuters reports.
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We asked readers to share their journal entries from the pandemic. If you'd like to share yours, you can do so here. |
March 25, 2020. New York City. Covid-19 has stopped New York City (well, it's paused). No one saw it coming. I haven't worked at Jazz Standard for about two months. I'm living on unemployment, ironically paying more than what I was making. About $650 per week. I'm holding on to all the money I can. I haven't paid March's rent and we plan on being late for April. No eviction till July and that's just the beginning. Social distance has starved me for friends, for touch, for love. I'm trying to balance my day away from screens, but it's hard. I lose track of time and spend the whole day unable to cope with the feeling of uncertainty. The last few weeks have been easier to forget. Everything blends together in a flavorless form. In the apartment, I've been cooking regularly. In some absurdist way, the quarantine has made me experience a quality of life reserved for middle age. I've never had this much money before. How does it end? Today, I listened to a podcast about the reality of Covid-19 lasting four years. If that happens, I'm taking the risk, buying a car, and driving till I can't see skyscrapers. — Andy Andrade |
| Thanks for reading. I'll be back Friday. — Jonathan |
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