Classes suspended. Buildings and communities sealed off. Mass testing of residents. A rush to stock up on food, just in case.
Beijing, China’s sprawling capital, is starting to resemble other Chinese cities grappling with the latest wave of the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
Authorities are moving quickly to try to prevent a massive COVID-19 outbreak that could trigger a citywide lockdown like the one that has paralyzed Shanghai for more than three weeks. The political stakes are high as the ruling Communist Party prepares for a major congress this fall at which President Xi Jinping is seeking a third five-year term to reassert his position as China’s unquestioned leader.
Xi and the party’s main policymaking body, the Politburo, reaffirmed their commitment to a “zero-COVID” policy on Friday, putting China at odds with much of the world. While many countries are dropping restrictions and trying to live with the virus, China is keeping its international borders largely shut and closing off entire cities to all but essential travel.
The Politburo acknowledged the economic cost of lockdowns, saying efforts must be made to “minimize the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development,” the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Despite the toll on the economy and everyday life, the zero-COVID approach is extolled by the Communist Party as a virtuous display of self-sacrifice under the slogan “Persistence is victory.” Officials frequently point out China’s relatively low death toll and have accused the U.S. and other countries of essentially giving up.
Li Bin, a vice minister of China’s National Health Commission, cited China’s vast population and insufficient medical resources.
“If the COVID response loosens to let the virus run free, it will definitely lead to a huge number of infections in a short period of time and a large number of severe and mortal cases,” Li said at a media briefing Friday.
Shanghai reported 52 more deaths on Thursday, bringing the toll to 337 in its ongoing outbreak. Liang Wannian, the head of China’s COVID-19 expert team, told the briefing there have been signs of improvement in Shanghai, but the situation remains serious. The city recorded about 15,000 cases on Thursday, accounting for the vast majority nationwide.
Beijing’s strategy of early testing and isolation appears to be working so far. About 200 cases and no deaths have been reported since the outbreak started a week ago, though the daily number of new cases has creeped up to nearly 50.
“I think Beijing can do better than other cities because Beijing is the capital city of China,” said community worker Liu Xuan. “And my work is related to virus control and prevention so I feel confident.”
A botched response to the Beijing outbreak may not impact Xi’s plans for a third term, but it could dent the party’s reputation and with it, Xi’s room for maneuver on issues such as personnel appointments, experts said.
“Even if Xi Jinping himself is untouchable, a widespread sense of failure and disappointment is bad for a congress year,” said Joseph Torigian, a Chinese politics expert at American University in Washington, D.C.
The pomp and circumstance in the run-up and during the meeting would contrast with the frustration, he said.
Liang, the COVID-19 expert team head, said citywide lockdowns can be avoided if early detection, reporting, isolation and treatment are done well. “Fighting omicron … does not necessarily mean locking down the entire city,” he said.
What remains unclear is whether the highly contagious variant will breach Beijing’s defenses, and whether containment measures will be enforced in a way that minimizes disruption to daily life and the work of government and businesses.
Beijing is taking no chances. The government ordered the indefinite closure of schools and three rounds of testing of virtually all the capital’s 21 million residents this week. When cases are uncovered, entire buildings and sometime neighborhoods are locked down.
Residents have generally complied with the demands, joining long lines for testing and food, some stretching outside supermarkets this week.
The cautionary tale for Beijing is Shanghai, China’s largest city, where millions of residents have been under a lockdown for more than three weeks. Food has run low at times and heavy-handed enforcement and a lack of preparation have prompted heavy criticism, despite government efforts to censor it.
Images online have shown residents grappling with police and confronting health workers, kicking at barriers, screaming off their balconies and banging pots and pans to show their frustration.
The lockdown has dealt a blow to the economy at a time when growth was already slowing. The International Monetary Fund has reduced its forecast of Chinese growth this year to 4.4% because of the shutdowns of Shanghai and other industrial centers. That would be down from 8.1% growth last year and below the Communist Party’s 5.5% target.
Liang said the short-term pain would be exchanged for long-term returns to normal production, life and economic development. “I think this is cost-effective and is also a kind of balance,” Liang said.
Yu Changping, a doctor of respiratory medicine at People’s Hospital of Wuhan University, concurred.
“Inconvenience to people’s life or economic impact is the pain we have to suffer and a price we have to pay,” Yu said. “But if we fail to prevent the spread of the virus, we will suffer heavier losses with larger and broader social and economic impact.”
Any shortcomings in the government’s response could inspire the citizenry to take matters into their own hands, eroding party control, said June Teufel Dreyer, a Chinese politics specialist at the University of Miami.
Shanghai fell short in areas such as distribution of food and medicine and provisions for the elderly and pets. In response, residents banded together in ad hoc groups to provide relief, a development that the party may have found disturbing,
“Will the party-government be able to reimpose control once the feeling of crisis abates? I don’t think they’ll find it too easy to do so,” Dreyer said.
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Associated Press video producer Olivia Zhang contributed to this report.
South Korea will ease its outdoor mask mandate starting next week as COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations continue to decline.
Starting Monday, people will only be required to wear a mask outdoors when participating in gatherings of more than 50 people or attending sports and cultural events with potentially large crowds, health authorities said in a briefing Friday. The mask mandate for indoors and public transport will also remain in place.
Health workers have diagnosed a daily average of around 63,000 new cases in the past seven days, including 50,568 in the latest 24 hours — a drop-off from mid-March when the country was reporting hundreds of thousands of infections each day at the height of an omicron-driven surge. As hospitalizations and deaths slow, less than 30% of the country’s 2,800 intensive care units designated for COVID-19 patients are occupied.
South Korea had already removed much of its pandemic restrictions earlier this month, including a 10-person limit on private social gatherings, a midnight curfew at restaurants, coffee shops and bars and a ban on food consumption at movie theaters, concert halls and indoor sports venues.
Jeong Eun-kyeong, commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said the weekslong decline in infections even with the easing of social distancing suggests that the country’s outbreak is stabilizing. She said health authorities concluded it was safe to relax the mask mandate because the risk of transmissions is much lower outdoors and other countries didn’t see a meaningful increase in infections after easing similar restrictions.
Jeong recommended that people still wear masks outdoors if they have symptoms like coughs or fever or are in crowded spaces like theme parks where it’s hard for them to maintain at least a meter (3-foot) distance with others.
However, the office of President-elect Yoon Suk Yeol, who takes office in May 10, raised concern that the move to ease the mask mandate could be premature. Hong Kyung-hee, spokesperson of Yoon’s presidential transition committee, said the committee had recommended the government to monitor virus trends for at least another month before deciding whether to relax the mask mandate.
Black and Hispanic Americans remain far more cautious in their approach to COVID-19 than white Americans, recent polls show, reflecting diverging preferences on how to deal with the pandemic as federal, state and local restrictions fall by the wayside.
Despite majority favorability among U.S. adults overall for measures like mask mandates, public health experts said divided opinions among racial groups reflect not only the unequal impact of the pandemic on people of color but also apathy among some white Americans.
Black Americans (63%) and Hispanic Americans (68%) continue to be more likely than white Americans (45%) to say they are at least somewhat worried about themselves or a family member being infected with COVID-19, according to an April poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Throughout the pandemic, Black and Hispanic communities have experienced higher rates of illness and death from COVID, said Amelia Burke-Garcia, public health program area director at NORC. Those experiences have resulted in greater levels of stress, anxiety and awareness of the risks of catching COVID-19, she said, which means people of color are more likely to feel measures like mask mandates are needed.
“We’ve seen these trends endure throughout the entire pandemic,” Burke-Garcia said. “What we’re seeing now as mitigation measures are being rolled back is there’s still great concern amongst Black Americans and Hispanic Americans around the risk of getting sick.”
Seventy-one percent of Black Americans say they favor requiring face masks for people traveling on airplanes, trains and other types of public transportation. That’s more than the 52% of white Americans who support mask mandates for travelers; 29% of white Americans are opposed. Among Hispanic Americans, 59% are in favor and 20% are opposed. The poll was conducted before a ruling by a federal judge scuttled the government’s mask mandate for travelers.
In Indiana, Tuwanna Plant said she sees fewer and fewer people wearing masks in public, even though she said she has been diligent in always wearing one. Plant, who is Black, said she sees people treating the pandemic like it’s over, and she wants the mask mandate to continue.
Plant, a 46-year-old sous chef, said she had some concerns about getting the vaccine and took every other precaution, such as cleaning and masking, to avoid getting sick but recently was hospitalized for COVID.
The experience scared her — she has a preexisting lung condition, and knew family members who died from COVID. She said she plans to get vaccinated as soon as she can.
“I called my children while I was in the emergency room,” Plant said. “I didn’t know … if it was going to get better or worse, I didn’t know. So it was the experience for me altogether.”
Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist and epidemiologist and editor-at-large at Kaiser Health News, said people’s lived experiences deeply shape how they perceive the pandemic. Anecdotes and personal experience can have a larger impact on behavior than numbers, she said, and people of color are more likely to have had negative experiences with health care prior to and during the pandemic.
While new medicines and vaccines have made it easier to treat COVID-19, Gounder said many people still face systemic barriers to accessing that medical care. Others risk losing their jobs or are unable to take time off if they do fall ill, she said, or cannot avoid things like public transit to reduce their exposures.
“When people argue that they don’t have to mask on the plane, that means something very different for someone who has access to all of these new innovations than it does for somebody who has no health insurance, who struggles to care for an elderly parent and their children, who’s maybe a single mom working in a job where she has no paid sick and family medical leave,” Gounder said. “It’s just a completely different calculation.”
In January, an AP-NORC poll showed Black and Hispanic Americans were more likely than white Americans to feel certain things would be essential for getting back to life without feeling at risk of infection. For example, 76% of Black Americans and 55% of Hispanic Americans said it was essential for getting back to normal that most people regularly wear face masks in public indoor places, compared with 38% of white Americans.
Last month, an AP-NORC poll showed Black and Hispanic Americans, 69% and 49%, were more likely than white Americans, 35%, to say they always or often wear a face mask around others.
Lower support for mask mandates and other precautions among white Americans may also reflect less sensitivity towards what occurs in communities of color. In a 2021 study of mask wearing during the early part of the pandemic, researchers found that mask wearing among white people increased when white people were dying at greater rates in the surrounding community. When Black and Hispanic people were dying, mask usage was lower.
Berkeley Franz, a co-author of the paper, said that in addition to residential segregation that separates white people from communities of color, past research has shown that white people can display ambivalence towards policies that they believe mostly help people of color.
“Anti-Blackness is really pervasive and has tremendous consequences, both in terms of the policies that get passed, and what doesn’t,” Franz said. “White people can still have really racist actions without seeing themselves that way and understanding the consequences. It’s largely below the surface and unintentional but has tremendous consequences in terms of equity.”
Communities of color also have a different perception of risk from the pandemic than their white counterparts, said Michael Niño, a sociology professor at the University of Arkansas who co-authored a paper on race, gender and masking in the pandemic.
“Masking is something that is relatively cheap, it’s effective, and it’s something that can be easily done,” he said. “It doesn’t require any sort of governmental response. These broader histories of racism and sexism in the United States are most certainly shaping some of the patterns we’re seeing.”
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The AP-NORC poll of 1,085 adults was conducted April 14-18 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
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Ma covers education and equity for AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter: https://www.twitter. Fingerhut, an AP polling writer, is based in Washington.
The Associated Press’ reporting around issues of race and ethnicity is supported in part by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
South Africa is seeing a rapid rise in COVID-19 cases driven by yet another version of the coronavirus, health experts say.
Cases had been dropping in the country since February. But a new omicron subvariant that scientists call BA.4 began pushing up cases last week and they have risen rapidly since, said Salim Abdool Karim, who previously advised the government on its COVID-19 response.
So far, there has been only a slight rise in hospitalizations and no increase in deaths, said Abdool Karim, who is a public health expert at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
South Africa is recording just over 6,000 COVID-19 cases a day, up from a few hundred just a few weeks ago. The proportion of positive tests jumped from 4% in mid-April to 19% Thursday, according to official figures. Wastewater surveillance has also shown increases in coronavirus spread.
The new mutant appears to be quickly achieving dominance over the original omicron and other versions of the virus, but Abdool Karim said “it’s too early to tell whether BA.4 is going to cause a fully-fledged wave.”
Still, the new version is notable because the omicron variant first emerged in November in South Africa and Botswana before sweeping around the world.
There is one concerning trend, said Helen Rees, executive director of the Reproductive Health and HIV Institute at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: Children are the first to be winding up in hospitals, just like during the original omicron surge.
Experts say BA.4 seems to be more transmissible than both the original omicron variant and an omicron relative known as BA.2. Scientists are still studying the new mutant, but it doesn’t appear that BA.4 causes more severe disease than other versions of the virus, WHO said in a recent report.
In South Africa, gatherings for the recent Easter, Ramadan and Passover holidays, plus massive flooding in the coastal city of Durban, may have contributed to the current surge, Abdool Karim said.
BA.4 has shown up in other countries, but it’s not clear whether it “it’s going to become a globally dominant variant,” he said.
So far, it hasn’t made inroads in the U.S., where BA.2 remains the dominant strain and its descendant, called BA.2.12.1, is gaining ground. That descendant is believed to spread faster than previous versions of the virus and caused about 29% of U.S. COVID cases in the latest week, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Can BA.4 out-compete BA.2.12.1? Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, a Johns Hopkins University infectious disease expert, said the two variants are spreading in different populations, and he doesn’t know of any data “that would support a robust direct comparison.”
Since the start of the pandemic, South Africa has had the lion’s share of COVID-19 in Africa. Although the country’s 60 million people account for less than 5% of Africa’s population of 1.3 billion, South Africa has had more than a quarter of the continent’s 11.4 million reported cases and nearly half of Africa’s 252,000 deaths. Experts say that may be because it has a more developed public health system and keeps better records of hospitalizations and deaths than other African countries.
More than 44% of adult South Africans are vaccinated against COVID-19, according to government statistics.
Benido Impouma, a WHO official in Africa, said the latest surge “shows that people must remain vigilant and continue to adhere to public safety measures such as wearing masks, washing hands and social distancing.”
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Ungar reported from Louisville, Kentucky. AP journalist Rodney Muhumuza in Kampala, Uganda, contributed.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Total Doses Distributed = 725,595,715. Total Doses Administered = 574,738,978. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 257,496,852. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 219,550,028.
Africa is seeing a surge of outbreaks of preventable diseases as a result of disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
The continent recorded a 400% increase in measles, to more than 17,000 cases between January and March, compared to the same period last year, Dr. Benido Impouma, a WHO expert in Africa, told a press briefing.
Two years of disruptions by the coronavirus pandemic have had “major effects on the provision of routine health services, with immunization being seriously affected” in many countries, he said.
Twenty-four countries confirmed outbreaks of polio last year, four times more than in 2020. Last year 13 countries reported new outbreaks of yellow fever, rising from nine in 2020 and three in 2019, according to WHO figures.
“The rise in outbreaks of other vaccine-preventable diseases is a warning sign,” Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO regional director for Africa, said in a statement. “As Africa works hard to defeat COVID-19, we must not forget other health threats. Health systems could be severely strained not only by COVID-19 but by other diseases.”
The continent of 1.3 billion people has reported 11.4 million COVID-19 cases, including 252,000 deaths, according to figures from the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although the virus had been trending downwards since January, the WHO reported a rise in cases Thursday driven by a doubling of infection rates in South Africa, the African country most affected by the pandemic.
Impouma, the WHO official, said that in the wake of the pandemic the agency seeks to support countries to scale up COVID-19 vaccinations as well as routine immunization services.
“The same is true for routine immunization as for COVID,” said Helen Rees, executive director of a reproductive health and HIV institute at South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand. “There is the direct health … problem, but there’s this spinoff in terms of adversely affecting poor development and contributing to poverty, which is absolutely critical for our region.”
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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic
