Covid-19 backlash in China sparks worry

China had swung from the stringent zero-Covid policy of the government with quarantine regimes which caused unrest among people in the cities and led to protests to that of relaxing all the rules and allowing free movement of people had led to a fresh outbreak of the epidemic. It is not clear how many are infected and how many have died. But anecdotal evidence from the foreign media shows that funeral parlours and crematoria in Beijing have become crowded and the workers at these places are overworked. Those at these places were saying that there are not enough hearses and families are transporting the bodies in their vehicles and black smoke from the crematoria are signalling the overcrowded. There was heated debate and criticism for the government’s zero-Covid policy, and the criticism now is that the Chinese officials are not disclosing the extent of the resurgence of Covid. The government had said that there is no testing of asymptomatic people, that is people who test positive but who show no symptoms of Covid. It seems that a large number of people fall into this category. It is also argued that though China had started its vaccination programme quite early in 2021, the coverage, especially of older people above 80, has lingered at around 66.4 per cent. It shows that vaccine cycle of the first two shots followed by a booster shot was not completed in a majority of cases.

Chinese health officials now indicate that there will be three Covid waves from now to early March as the country marks its New Year on January 21, and millions of people go back to their villages, and then return. It is expected that at each stage, thousands of people would fall sick. Some of the Western agencies are estimating that more than million people could die due to Covid in 2023. There is intense suspicion in the West that the Chinese government is not sharing the actual number of those infected and of fatalities due to the virus. When Covid-19 broke out initially in late 2019, the number of those died was a little above 4,000 in Wuhan and other places. That figure of those who died of Covid has risen to 5,235.

China has faced criticism, mainly from the West, about its handling of Covid. First, there was the complaint that the news of the outbreak of the epidemic was delayed and people were allowed to fly out of Wuhan after the city suffered the infection. Then the criticism was about the origin of the infection, whether it has its origin in the wet market where live animals are sold, or whether the virus leaked from a high-security virological research laboratory in Wuhan. The World Health Organisation (WHO) was rapped too for not declaring the medical emergency both in China and in the world. The origins of the Covid-19 origin remains untraceable despite the efforts of an independent WHO team in collaboration with Chinese scientists and officials. The theory about the leak has however been laid to rest.

Apart from the fact that Covid had spread from China to south-east Asia, to the rest of Asia and to Europe and then to America, the impact of the epidemic on the Chinese economy had also impacted the global economy because much of the manufacturing exports to Europe and America came from China. The real worry about the fresh surge in Covid in China is that it would affect factory production and this in turn would cause shortages of manufactured goods.

Though moves are afoot to shift many of businesses and manufacturing units out of China to India, Vietnam and other countries, the transition has not taken place and it will take a longer time. That is why, Covid in China is a concern of the rest of the world.