Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday called for greater efforts and unity as his country enters a “new phase” in its fight against the Covid-19 epidemic. The Chinese leader’s public statements are the second he has made about the health situation in the country since the government decided to end its “zero Covid” policy in early December of this year.
“The light of hope is before us.” In a speech broadcast on national television for the New Year, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for unity and urged people not to lose hope as the country grapples with an explosion of Covid-19 cases after the sudden lifting of sanitary restrictions in early December after unusual protests.
Three years after the first cases of coronavirus appeared in Wuhan, China on December 7 ended its draconian ‘zero Covid’ policy without warning. Since the restrictions were lifted, hospitals have been overwhelmed by massive arrivals of patients – most of them elderly –, crematoriums are at capacity and many pharmacies are running out of medicines.
“The prevention and control of the epidemic have entered a new phase. We are still in a difficult moment, ”Xi Jinping acknowledged in his speech before asking his fellow citizens not to lose confidence.
This is the second statement on the epidemic this week by the strongman in Beijing. On Monday, Xi called for measures to “effectively protect people’s lives.”
The end of the ‘zero Covid’ policy
The country reported this Saturday, December 31, more than 7,000 new positive cases and one additional death related to Covid-19 in a population of 1.4 billion inhabitants. According to experts, these figures are far below the actual numbers and seem totally out of touch with reality on the ground.
Despite this rebound in the epidemic, the authorities will end the mandatory quarantines upon arrival in the country on January 8 and will allow the Chinese to travel abroad, after three years of limitations.
But as a precaution, several European countries, including France and Italy, as well as the United States and Japan, have announced that they will require negative tests from passengers coming from China.
The ‘zero Covid’ policy, whose measures have isolated China from the rest of the world and dealt a severe blow to the world’s second largest economy, has begun to show its limits in recent months and has caused growing frustration among the population; giving rise to unprecedented anti-government protests.
WHO calls for more transparency from China
On Friday, December 30, World Health Organization (WHO) officials met with Chinese officials to discuss the rise in infections and asked them to share real-time data so other countries could respond effectively.
“A high-level meeting (…) was held between WHO and China on the current surge in Covid-19 cases to learn more about the situation and offer WHO expertise and support,” the agency said. UN health agency in a statement.
“WHO reiterated its call for specific, real-time data on the epidemiological situation to be shared regularly, including more data on genetic sequencing and the impact of the disease, and data on hospitalizations, intensive care unit admissions and deaths,” the WHO said.
The organization also requested data on vaccinations and immunization status. Those talks came after a week in which WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus called on the Chinese authorities to be more open and transparent about the Covid-19 situation.
From success to ineffectiveness: three years of ‘zero Covid’ policy in China
For many experts, the situation in the country is more complex than in 2020. China had been very successful in its policy of containing the spread of the virus; in June 2020, the Xi Jinping government even published a White Paper and announced its victory against the disease.
“Under the firm leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, with Xi as leader, China has built an effective system (…) This system is what has made it possible to win the war for all against the virus,” explained the minister at the time. document.
In December 2020, when the first vaccines arrived, China made a decision without equal in the world: to vaccinate only adults between the ages of 18 and 59 and decided not to give priority to the elderly, considered in the rest of the countries. as a high-risk population.
Convinced that the virus could only come from abroad, the country gave priority to vaccinating people who handled imported products, customs officials, medical personnel, public transport employees and product markets. fresh.
While vaccination progressed very slowly, China’s ‘zero Covid’ strategy consisted mainly of widespread lockdowns, mass testing and isolation of infected people.
In 2021, the situation began to change. In Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei, the 11 million inhabitants were confined for three weeks after the discovery of a hundred positive cases. In the spring of the same year, two provinces, Liaoning and Anhui, reported several cases and increased local lockdowns.
China’s health policy received the final blow with the appearance of the highly transmissible Omicron variant at the end of December 2021. From then on, confinements continued to multiply while China maintained its ‘zero Covid’ policy, considered excessive and ineffective by experts and by part of the population.
In 2022, since mid-November, almost every city in the country, including the capital, suffered a major outbreak of Covid-19.
The leaders, faced with the impossibility of decreeing the confinement of a capital of more than 20 million inhabitants and apparently recognizing the ineffectiveness of the strategy, given the mutations of the virus, decided to lift the restrictions, but without clearly announcing their plan B.
Meanwhile, several countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Israel and the United States announced measures for travelers from China to prevent the entry of new variants of the virus that, although in a different way, also marked 2022.
With Reuters and AFP
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