Shanghai’s harsh lockdown shocks a world already living with the virus. Citizens shouting from the window to let them out or knocking down the fences in front of their homes, begging for food or fearing that the officials will take their infected children. Zero tolerance in China is globally scorned as sterile, costly stubbornness and alien to science and reason, explained only from political arrogance. The matter is more complex.
A fair trial requires a look in the rearview mirror. That policy proved for two years more effective than the endless cycles of openings and closings in the West. The cradle of the pandemic and home to a fifth of the world’s population has barely counted 5,000 deaths, its economy was the only one among the large ones that grew in 2021 and last year it expanded by more than 8%. It has shielded China from global deaths and recessions, but it is pertinent to ask if it is still valid with mass vaccinations and more contagious and less harmful variants.
Shanghai suggests not. There is no doubt about the magnitude of the drama. China will pay a heavy bill after five weeks with its financial heart stopped. Quarantines torment many and psychologists warn of anxiety and depression and other consequences. Shanghai has broken the casuistry of short quarantines and guaranteed supplies that made them affordable for the common good. There are doubts, therefore, whether Shanghai responds to the traditional recipe.
self government
Shanghai is represented as a country within a country, rabidly cosmopolitan, more often aware of the world than of the interior. Many Shanghainese feel that they would be better off if the city were self-governing and not dependent on Beijing. His management enjoys a justified fame. He has already avoided the SARS epidemic without damage and during two years of coronavirus he avoided contagion. So, when the first ones emerged at the end of February, he rejected the medieval confinements. A more international route, less Chinese. He sealed real estate complexes and it didn’t work. He closed small districts and neither. With the infections unleashed, he already approved an unprecedented “dual quarantine & rdquor ;, five days half of the city east of the Huangpu River and another five the west, but the cases at the time of the relief in the first continued to rise and he finally accepted sucker Punch.
Shanghai closed with 13,000 daily cases when Shenzhen, the southern macro-city, had done so the previous month with 60 and suffocated the focus in a week. Shanghai needed more than a thousand cases to order the massive tests while in Beijing they prevailed last week with six. The zero tolerance policy has not failed in Shanghai, Shanghai has failed the zero tolerance policy. The arrival from the capital of Sun Chunlan, a member of the politburo and responsible for the pandemic since the times of Wuhan, certified weeks ago that the third ways and other experiments had ended. There is not a lot of solidarity in China for the Shanghai drama, judged as a punishment for his arrogance. The libretto is now followed by dictation. Guangzhou canceled its flights and tested a third of its 15 million inhabitants after discovering a “probable” case last week. without waiting to confirm it.
The authorities were wrong
“The Shanghai authorities said they had it under control and they were wrong. They believed they could do better than the rest of China with their lockdowns. And they lacked a contingency plan to keep the population at home and ensure the food supply. You cannot suspend all logistics services for a long time. We are seeing that Guangzhou, Hangzhou and Beijing have learned their lesson & rdquor ;, says Dali Yang, professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.
The more the world asks China to retire its policy, the more vigorously China defends it as life insurance for its weakest population. His stubbornness is usually explained from spurious political reasons. In the autumn congress of the party, where Xi Jinping will confirm a third presidential term, or in the complicated resignation of a policy marked for two years as the corollary of the superiority of his political system. They are speculations that are not without basis, but they are not without verification either. More certain and imminent is the threat of suffering a disaster like the one in Hong Kong. The former colony, with a population similar to that of Catalonia, has suffered 9,000 deaths this year from an outbreak that devastated its hospital network. No one in China has forgotten the patients cared for in beds on the street or the piled-up body bags. Hong Kong and the mainland share the problem of under-vaccination of its elderly. Almost 90% of the Chinese population has the complete guideline but the percentage drops to 51% in those over 80 years of age. The 350 dead in Shanghai are overwhelmingly elderly who have not been vaccinated because they have not wanted or been unable to due to previous serious illnesses.
Don’t follow the western example
Chinese and foreign experts certify the tragedy if China adopts the relaxation of the United States or Europe. If ómicron destroyed the Hong Kong health network, one of the best in the world, it is scary to think of the less developed China. Rural areas, where 40% of the 1.3 billion Chinese live, barely have 1.4 million beds, according to the National Health Commission. The “colossal outbreak & rdquor; that researchers at Peking University anticipate would kill not only those infected with covid but also other patients who could not be assisted. Airfinity, a British health consultancy, estimates that a nationwide outbreak would leave a million dead within three months. A million deaths are unaffordable for a society and a government that have counted 5,000 since news of a strange pneumonia arrived in Wuhan.
Any turn goes through the previous vaccination of the elderly. China initially stimulated it in young people because they accounted for most of the infections and feared side effects in the weakest. “It was not indicated for the elderly or the sick because no country wants the vaccinated to die. There were doubts both in the elderly and in the Government,” Dali Yang reveals. Many remain elusive because the vaccine represents a small risk that is assumed in the face of a greater threat that has not existed in China. The coronavirus has had a minimal presence in most of the country and those elderly are now the weak flank of the national defense against covid.
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It is legitimate to wonder if a government that locks up 25 million people for more than a month cannot vaccinate its elderly. The idea, in practice, is difficult. Vaccinating millions of stubborn old men, who have refused needlesticks despite dozens of eggs, supermarket discounts and other bribes, involves physical force and lackluster scenes with officials dragging them off and tying them to a bed. Not even China can bear that blow to its image and it is certain that those who enthusiastically demand compulsory vaccination today will denounce tomorrow the inexcusable violation of rights.
Circumstances bind China to its zero tolerance policy for lack of better alternatives. He assures that he will only change it when its cost exceeds its benefits and the protection of the weakest does not seem like a crazy argument. Listen that ómicron is unstoppable but the same was already said of other variants that it stopped, always more contagious and undetectable than the previous one. China does not allow debate and trusts its recipe, which is not the Shanghai botched, but the immediate closure and tolerable quarantines of one or two weeks.