The COVID-19 pandemic has entered its third year. More than 5.5 million lives have been lost around the world. Hospitals in many countries, including the U.S., are once again at crisis point, and coronavirus continues to jeopardize the global economy. And then there’s China. As one of the last countries to follow a zero-COVID policy, the world’s most populous nation has lost less than 6,000 of its 1.4 billion people to COVID-19, while expanding its economy by 8.1% in 2021 and registering a record trade surplus.
China has no shortage of critics, who decry its weeks-long city-wide lockdowns as sensational examples of authoritarian excess, and dismiss the zero-COVID approach as a looming failure, bad science or a ploy by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to shore up political control. But without whole-of-society support for the zero-COVID approach, it would be virtually impossible to make 20 million people stay at home over a handful of cases—as China has done in the run up to the Lunar New Year, mostly in the western city of Xi’an and in the northwestern province of Henan.
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“Few countries have the ability like China in terms of effectively mobilizing the resources and capacities for pandemic control,” says Dr. Huang Yanzhong, a senior health policy expert from the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR)—not only in terms of “the clear commitment from the top leaders” but also “the overwhelming support from the public.”
The comparative fragility of China’s hospital system makes one important reason plain. According to OECD researchers, the U.S. had nearly 26 ICU beds per 100,000 people in 2018. Data from 2017 shows that Germany had nearly 34 per 100,000. By comparison, China in 2017 had less than 4 ICU beds for the same headcount. Following a Malthusian strategy of “letting COVID rip” through the…
Source : time
