Initially, Shanghai took a light approach with targeted lockdowns sealing individual buildings - a pioneering strategy led by doctor Zhang Wenhong, who had been openly calling on the government to prepare to reopen. Then in March, the virus began spreading in Shanghai, China’s cosmopolitan finance hub. It also included a proposal to designate Hainan, a tropical island in the country’s south, as a pilot zone to experiment with relaxing controls.Ī chaotic, deadly outbreak in Hong Kong alarmed Beijing. It ran over 100 pages long and included detailed proposals to boost China’s stalling vaccination campaign, increase ICU bed capacity, stock up on antivirals, and order patients with mild COVID-19 symptoms to stay at home, one of the people said. It concluded it was time for China to begin preparations for a possible reopening. The existence of the document is being reported for the first time by the AP. That winter, the State Council appointed public health experts to a new committee tasked with reviewing COVID-19 controls, which submitted a report in March 2022, four people with knowledge of it said. The less lethal but far more infectious omicron made curbing COVID-19 harder and the risks of its spread lower, and nearby Korea, Japan and Singapore were all loosening controls. Toward the end of 2021, many public health experts and leaders began thinking about how to exit from the zero-COVID policy. “It’s absolutely bad timing … this was not a prepared opening.” “It wasn’t a sound public health decision at all,” said a China CDC official, declining to be named to speak candidly on a sensitive matter. Some scientists think even more lives could have been saved. However, 200,000 to 300,000 deaths could have been prevented if the country was better vaccinated and stocked with antivirals, according to modeling by the University of Hong Kong and scientist estimates. The pressure mounted until the authorities suddenly yielded, allowing the virus to sweep the country with no warning - and with deadly consequence.Įxperts estimate that many hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps more, may have died in China’s wave of COVID - far higher than the official toll of under 90,000, but still a significantly lower death rate than in the United States and Europe. Unrest began to simmer, with demonstrations, factory riots, and shuttered businesses. So the country stuck to mass testing and quarantining millions of people, even as omicron evaded increasingly harsh controls. Zero-COVID had become a point of national pride, and tightening controls on speech under Xi had made scientists reluctant to speak out against the party line.īy the time the Shanghai outbreak was under control, China was months away from the 20th Party Congress, the country’s most important political meeting in a decade, making reopening politically difficult. As early as March 2022, top medical experts submitted detailed proposals to prepare for a gradual exit to the State Council, China’s cabinet.īut discussions were silenced after an outbreak the same month in Shanghai, which prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to lock the city down. In late 2021, China’s leaders began discussing how to lift restrictions. But with the emergence of the highly infectious omicron variant in late 2021, many of China’s top medical experts and officials worried zero-COVID was unsustainable. For two years, China stood out for its tough but successful controls against the virus, credited with saving millions of lives as other countries struggled with stop-and-start lockdowns.
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