Opinion China’s renewed struggle with Covid-19

At a time when most of the world is working to put behind the trauma of the Covid pandemic, the disease seems to be back with a vengeance in China. On Thursday, the country recorded 31,454 new cases, the highest daily rise since the virus was first reported almost three years ago. In the past 10 weeks, tens of millions of people have been confined to their homes across more than 50 cities and towns, leading to restlessness and aggravating the country’s economic slowdown. Protests have erupted at the world’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou over non-payment of salaries and there are reports of police using force to quell the unrest. In Guangzhou province, migrant workers, a large part of the workforce, have been forced into quarantine centres and not allowed to return home.

According to the WHO, the current surge has been driven by particularly contagious avatars of the coronavirus’s Omicron variant, BF.7 and BA.5.1.7. It’s also a fact that large parts of the country have been under the virus’ sway for the better part of this year, even though the cases have not been severe. Quite inexplicably, the responses of the Chinese authorities are scarcely different from those they undertook in the early months of the pandemic when the coronavirus was a scarcely understood pathogen. People have been asked not to venture out of their homes for the rest of this month. The government will conduct daily PCR tests as a part of what it calls the “war of annihilation” against the virus. But curiously, vaccination is not an important part of the anti-Covid arsenal. For a country that has provided vaccines to other parts of the world, China has an especially low rate of primary vaccination, particularly among the elderly — health authorities claim about 85 per cent people above 60 have received both shots of the vaccines. But there are question marks over these figures — the economic slowdown has pushed the IMF to ask China to ramp up vaccination. Even more critical questions have been asked about the country’s homegrown vaccines. Private pharma firm Sinovac and state-run Sinopharm, which manufacture most of the vaccines in use in China, have not put out data in the public domain on final-stage clinical trials. In April, Gao Fu, China’s top disease control official reportedly acknowledged that the vaccines used in the country have a low efficacy rate.

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The surge in China is a warning that the pandemic is not over yet. The world should not give up its quest for a variant proof Covid vaccine. It should also keep pushing the most populous nation to be more transparent.