China Rethinks Covid Approach

"China, the last major country to stick with a zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19, is now actively exploring ways to loosen controls.

In preparation for a potential opening, Chinese officials are looking into the use of travel bubbles modeled on measures taken during the Winter Olympics, collecting data on new antiviral drugs and scouting sites abroad for future production of homegrown Chinese mRNA vaccines, people familiar with the matter said.

Covid-19 controls likely won't be eased before the spring of 2023, two of the people said, but experimental opening measures could arrive in select cities as early as this summer.

Chinese public-health experts have recently started to discuss some of the efforts publicly, part of an effort to prepare Chinese people to live with a virus the country has spent two years trying mightily to eradicate.

"In the near future, at an appropriate time, there will be a Chinese-style road map for living with the virus," Zeng Guang, China's former chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Prevention and Control, wrote on China's Twitter-like Weibo on Monday.

Officials in departments covering transportation, customs and border control have been tasked since January with exploring adjustments to Covid-19-control policies that can eventually be presented to China's top leadership, a person with knowledge of the pandemic discussions in Beijing said.

The approach and timeline for a relaxation of Covid-19 controls aren't fixed and could change depending on future developments, such as the emergence of a new variant of the virus, the people say.

In response to a request to comment, China's National Health Commission pointed to an interview in February in which Liang Wannian, head of the commission's Covid-19 task force, said that "dynamic clearing" -- Beijing's preferred term for its current Covid-19 control strategy -- is "definitely not something that will continue forever."

China faces immense challenges in trying to calibrate its Covid-19 containment system in a way that avoids overwhelmed hospitals and large numbers of excess deaths.

Since the pandemic first exploded in the Chinese city of Wuhan in early 2020, Chinese leaders have continued to stick with an effective but laborious combination of digital surveillance, tight border controls, mass testing and targeted lockdowns to prevent and suppress larger outbreaks.

Chinese health officials have been closely monitoring Hong Kong, where an Omicron outbreak has spiraled out of control despite stringent border controls and social-distancing rules, and is spreading quickly among the city's unvaccinated elderly.

Mainland experts now see the former British colony as a "stress-test scenario," as well as a source of data on the effectiveness of various treatments and insight into fighting severe infection surges without resorting to hard lockdowns, a person familiar with the discussions said.

The sight of patients lying on gurneys in the open air as they waited for treatment in overwhelmed Hong Kong hospitals has struck a nerve in mainland China. While the mainland's more-affluent cities have responded to a government directive to beef up healthcare systems to contend with the pandemic, conditions are still basic in the countryside, home to more than one-third of China's population.

In 2020, a team of health experts looking into critical-care bed capacity in Asia found China had 3.6 critical-care beds per 100,000 people. The U.S., in comparison, has almost 30 beds per 100,000 people, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, a Mount Prospect, Ill., nonprofit.

Following the success of the so-called closed loop at the Beijing Winter Olympics, where visitors were tested daily and sealed off from the rest of the city through separate accommodation and transportation links, Chinese health officials are considering it as a template for other cities, one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

Similar bubbles could be used for sports competitions and conferences, and possibly also set up to facilitate travel to and from certain countries, researchers with the Beijing municipal CDC argued in a recent paper.

Other opening proposals being considered include quarantine exemptions for fully vaccinated international travelers and special entry arrangements for international students, one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

One important step toward easing zero-Covid measures, one of the people said, was China's conditional approval in February for emergency use of Pfizer Inc.'s Covid-19 antiviral drug Paxlovid. If approved for general use, the drug potentially gives Chinese health authorities a vital tool for the treatment of breakthrough infections, the person said." [1]

 

This medicine is still not available in Lithuania. And people in Lithuania die every day from Covid.  

1. World News: China Rethinks Covid Approach
Sha Hua; Zhai, Keith. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 03 Mar 2022: A.14.