When China abandoned the Covid-zero policy, accelerating outbreaks of infections and deaths, many feared a prolonged tide in cities and villages. Two months later, the worst appears to be over, and the regime is eager to shift focus to economic recovery.
Doctors who have been deployed across China to treat a flood of Covid cases say in interviews that the number of patients they are seeing has now dropped.
Cities and towns that saw a surge in infections and funerals are coming back to life. Health officials have stated that Covid cases peaked in late December 2022.
“Now the pandemic is already being forgotten in people’s minds,” says Gao Xiaobin, a doctor on the outskirts of a small town in east China’s Anhui province. “Nobody is wearing masks anywhere. That’s all over.”
The true toll of the outbreak is difficult to trace, with infections and deaths shrouded in censorship and poor data collection. Officially, China has reported nearly 79,000 Covid-related deaths that have occurred in hospitals since December 8. But the researchers say that’s a drastic underestimation because it excludes deaths outside of hospitals.
The Communist Party hopes to overcome these issues and focus on reviving the Chinese economy, which has been rocked by the lockdowns. Restoring growth could help repair its leader Xi Jinping’s image, damaged after three years of strict Covid-zero policies – which largely contained the virus but strangled the economy – and their abrupt and messy abandonment in December.
The regime’s position will depend heavily on its ability to generate jobs, including for a large pool of unemployed youth and graduates. Xi gave a positive statement, even as he acknowledged that the Covid outbreaks remain a concern. “Dawn is just ahead,” he said in a speech on Jan. 20, just before the Lunar New Year holiday.
One after another, local leaders declared that infections had peaked in their areas. Some of the most economically vital regions have issued plans to restore business confidence. Speaking about the economic revival last week to hundreds of officials, Huang Kunming, leader of the Communist Party in southern China’s Guangdong province, made no mention of the pandemic.
The government sought to shape the public narrative about the outbreak by limiting information and censoring criticism of its response. Still, anger has mounted over shortages of basic medicines and the regime’s concealment of Covid death tolls, while lines at funeral parlors lengthened, and city morgues overflowed with bodies.
But for many Chinese people, the imperative to overcome the pandemic and earn a living may, in the end, overshadow their ills. Many say they were more concerned with finding work, rebuilding businesses and securing a future for their children.
“People don’t even talk about Covid anymore,” says Zhao Xuqian, 30, who says he lost his last job at a flour factory in the central city of Zhengzhou and returned to his home village in Anhui province. He was thinking about finding a new job in the coming weeks. “The new year has begun. We must forget the past and look forward.”
While Chinese medical officials signaled that infections were falling, they also warned that the country remains vulnerable to new outbreaks, especially in rural areas, where medical services are much scarcer than in cities.
“A new spike of infections could emerge in areas that lack doctors and drugs, those – less than 10% of the entire country – that have not completed immunization,” said Gao Fu, former director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Diseases, told China Newsweek earlier this month. “I urge everyone to reserve the most important medical resources for the high-risk groups, who are elderly or people with underlying illnesses.”
To limit the number of new outbreaks this year, China will also have to administer more vaccines and booster shots, especially among the elderly, and better equip hospitals to handle patients who have not yet had Covid, say several doctors and epidemiologists.
The next wave may not be as massive, but it could be concentrated in vulnerable places and people who managed to avoid infection in the last outbreak. Some Chinese health officials estimate that up to 80% of the country’s 1.4 billion people were infected by the end of 2022 – other experts are skeptical of this estimate, saying that even with the rapid transmissibility of the omicron variant it is unlikely that it would infect so many people in so little time.
“Future projections of deaths will be partially determined by how well China can protect those most at risk,” says researcher Xi Chen, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health who has monitored the Covid pandemic in China.
China’s Covid outbreaks multiplied late last year as the rapidly expanding omicron variant upset armies of local authorities imposing lockdowns and travel restrictions. The surge turned into a tsunami after Xi lifted pandemic restrictions, seemingly shaken by nationwide protests and a deepening economic crisis.
China’s official death toll falls far short of initial projections by experts like Bill Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. He had previously estimated that the Covid outbreak in China could cause 2 million deaths.
“I don’t think we have any idea what really happened, other than the reasonable assumption that the real numbers are much higher than the official ones,” he says. Instead, the Chinese have built up a mosaic of impressions and stories about how their hometowns fared.
Lu Xiaozhou, a writer from central China’s Hubei province, claimed on social media that 10 out of 20 older residents died in his home village, out of several thousand people, during the recent wave of Covid, and that ” means a lot of luck”.
Li Jing, a farmer and former migrant worker from rural northwest China’s Yulin, said that while his older relatives survived the outbreak, other families were not so lucky. “There’s been a lot of funerals in the county lately, I’ve seen them,” he says. Asked about the future, he said: “Right now I don’t feel anything. I just want everything to go back to normal, that’s all.”
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