Most protesters on the mainland and in Hong Kong have focused their anger on restrictions that confine families to their homes for months. Global health experts have criticized China’s methods as unsustainable.
A look at China’s “zero-COVID” approach:
CHINA’S POLICY
President Xi Jinping’s government has pursued a policy of lockdowns, repeated testing of millions of people and lengthy quarantines for overseas arrivals in an attempt to tamp down spread.
At the beginning of the pandemic, other countries also had lockdowns and other restrictions that were eventually eased. Initially, the strategy in China succeeded at holding down the death toll. But it now means China’s population has very little exposure to the virus. And China is using only domestically developed vaccines that are less effective than those widely used elsewhere, and not enough elderly people are fully protected.
China’s continued reliance on lockdowns has been “rather draconian,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” It “really doesn’t make public health sense.”
NO ‘PLAN B’
China has had far fewer deaths compared to other large nations and one of the lowest deaths per capita in the world. The official death toll stands at 5,233, the majority during the initial outbreak in early 2020.
The strict policies saved lives, but cannot be sustained, said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“They do not have a plan B,” said Mokdad, adding that China’s approach ultimately will lead to surges in deaths and strain on hospitals. “They cannot lock the country forever.”
Julian Tang, a virologist at Britain’s University of Leicester, agreed that China’s attempt to stop every single case of COVID-19 is “simply impossible” and that it will do what most of the rest of the world has done and learn to live with the virus.
“There is no endgame for ‘zero-COVID,’” Tang said.
While China’s tough rules helped to avoid the thousands of infections, hospitalizations and deaths seen in the West during the first year of the pandemic, that disappeared with the emergence of the super-infectious omicron variant, Tang said.
“The only thing to do is to accept that there is going to be a certain level of disease,” Tang said.
GRIM PREDICTIONS
Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at Britain’s University of East Anglia, said China had now backed itself into a corner and warned that exiting would be painful. He said the value of measures like lockdowns and mask-wearing was mostly to delay as many infections as possible until vaccines were available.
“Unfortunately, the vaccines in China were not very good,” Hunter said, adding that vaccination levels of its most vulnerable people are low and much of the protection the shots provided has now faded for those immunized long ago.
Hunter said restrictions should be lifted incrementally to avoid hospitals being overwhelmed and said other restrictions, like mask-wearing, could be held in place to reduce spread as much as possible. He said China will eventually have to open its borders, a step that will inevitably bring a surge of disease.
“The surge will peak very quickly and also fade rather quickly. But while they are going through it, it will be dreadful,” he said.
The health analytics firm Airfinity released projections on Monday estimating that up to about 2 million people in China could be at risk of death if the country were to lift its “zero-COVID” policy, given its low vaccination rates and the lack of natural immunity among its population.
Local Chinese authorities eased some regulations after recent rallies, but the government showed no sign of backing down on its larger coronavirus strategy.
VACCINES AS ‘WAY OUT’
Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Exeter, said China should import mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
“The scientific answer is very clear,” Pankhania said.
He acknowledged that it might be politically challenging for China to acknowledge the shortcomings of its homegrown shots, but said the country needed to find a way to change course.
“This should not be about saving face,” he said. “The Chinese population is clearly fed up with lockdown after lockdown and the quickest way out is to immunize as fast as possible.”
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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.
Authorities eased anti-virus rules in scattered areas but affirmed China’s severe “zero- COVID” strategy Monday after crowds demanded President Xi Jinping resign during protests against controls that confine millions of people to their homes.
The government made no comment on the protests or criticism of Xi, the most widespread display of opposition to the ruling Communist Party in decades. There was no official word on how many people were detained after police used pepper spray against protesters in Shanghai and struggled to suppress demonstrations in other cities including Beijing, the capital.
The city government of Beijing announced it would no longer set up gates to block access to apartment compounds where infections are found. It made no mention of a deadly fire last week that set off the protests following angry questions online about whether firefighters or victims trying to escape were blocked by locked doors or other anti-virus controls.
“Passages must remain clear for medical transportation, emergency escapes and rescues,” said a city official in charge of epidemic control, Wang Daguang, according to the official China News Service.
“Zero COVID,” which aims to isolate every infected person, has helped to keep China’s case numbers lower than those of the United States and other major countries. But people in some areas have been confined at home for up to four months and say they lack reliable food supplies.
The ruling party promised last month to reduce the disruption of “zero COVID” by changing quarantine and other rules. But public acceptance is wearing thin after a spike in infections prompted cities to tighten controls, fueling complaints overzealous enforcement is hurting the public.
On Monday, the number of new daily cases rose to 40,347, including 36,525 with no symptoms.
The ruling party newspaper People’s Daily called for its anti-virus strategy to be carried out effectively, indicating Xi’s government has no plans to change course.
“Facts have fully proved that each version of the prevention and control plan has withstood the test of practice,” a People’s Daily commentator wrote.
Also Monday, the southern manufacturing and trade metropolis of Guangzhou, the biggest hotspot in China’s latest wave of infections, announced some residents will no longer be required to undergo mass testing. It cited a need to conserve resources.
Protests spread to at least eight major cities after at least 10 people died Thursday in the fire in an apartment building in Urumqi in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Most protesters complained about excessive restrictions, but some shouted slogans against Xi, China’s most powerful leader since at least the 1980s. In a video that was verified by The Associated Press, a crowd in Shanghai on Saturday chanted, “Xi Jinping! Step down! CCP! Step down!”
Police using pepper spray broke up that demonstration, but people returned to the same spot on Sunday for another protest. A reporter saw an unknown number being driven away in a police bus after being detained.
Elsewhere, videos on social media that said they were filmed in Nanjing in the east, Chongqing and Chengdu in the southwest and other cities showed protesters tussling with police in white protective suits or dismantling barricades used to seal off neighborhoods. The Associated Press could not verify that all those protests took place or where.
Earlier, the ruling party faced public anger over the deaths of two children whose parents said anti-virus controls hampered efforts to get emergency medical help.
Urumqi and a smaller city in Xinjiang, Korla, announced markets and other businesses in areas deemed at low risk of infection would reopen this week and public bus service would resume in what appeared to be an attempt to mollify the public.
There was no indication whether residents in higher-risk areas would be allowed out of their homes.
Protests against China’s restrictive COVID-19 measures appeared to roil in a number of cities Saturday night, in displays of public defiance fanned by anger over a deadly fire in the western Xinjiang region.
Many protests could not be immediately confirmed, but in Shanghai, police used pepper spray to stop around 300 protesters who had gathered at Middle Urumqi Road at midnight, bringing flowers, candles and signs reading “Urumqi, November 24, those who died rest in peace” to memorialize the 10 deaths caused by a fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang’s capital city Urumqi.
A protester who gave only his family name, Zhao, said one of his friends was beaten by police and two friends were pepper sprayed. He said police stomped his feet as he tried to stop them from taking his friend away. He lost his shoes in the process, and left the protest barefoot.
Zhao says protesters yelled slogans including “Xi Jinping, step down, Communist Party, step down,” “Unlock Xinjiang, unlock China,” “do not want PCR (tests), want freedom” and “press freedom.”
Around 100 police stood line by line, preventing some protesters from gathering or leaving, and buses carrying more police arrived later, Zhao said.
Another protester, who gave only his family name of Xu, said there was a larger crowd of thousands of demonstrators, but that police stood in the road and let protesters pass on the sidewalk.
Earlier Saturday, authorities in the Xinjiang region opened up some neighborhoods in Urumqi after residents held extraordinary late-night demonstrations against the city’s draconian “zero-COVID” lockdown that had lasted more than three months. Many alleged that obstacles caused by anti-virus measures made the fire worse. It took emergency workers three hours to extinguish the blaze, but officials denied the allegations, saying there were no barricades in the building and that residents were permitted to leave.
During Xinjiang’s lockdown, some residents elsewhere in the city have had their doors chained physically shut, including one who spoke to The Associated Press who declined to be named for fear of retribution. Many in Urumqi believe such brute-force tactics may have prevented residents from escaping in Thursday’s fire and that the official death toll was an undercount.
Anger boiled over after Urumqi city officials held a press conference about the fire in which they appeared to shift responsibility for the deaths onto the apartment tower’s residents.
“Some residents’ ability to rescue themselves was too weak,” said Li Wensheng, head of Urumqi’s fire department.
Police clamped down on dissenting voices, announcing the arrest of a 24-year-old woman for spreading “untrue information” about the death toll online.
Late Friday, people in Urumqi marched largely peacefully in big puffy winter jackets in the cold winter night.
Videos of protests featured people holding the Chinese flag and shouting “Open up, open up.” They spread rapidly on Chinese social media despite heavy censorship. In some scenes, people shouted and pushed against rows of men in the white whole-body hazmat suits that local government workers and pandemic-prevention volunteers wear, according to the videos.
By Saturday, most had been deleted by censors. The Associated Press could not independently verify all the videos, but two Urumqi residents who declined to be named out of fear of retribution said large-scale protests occurred Friday night. One of them said he had friends who participated.
The AP pinpointed the locations of two of the videos of the protests in different parts of Urumqi. In one video, police in face masks and hospital gowns faced off against shouting protesters. In another, one protester is speaking to a crowd about their demands. It is unclear how widespread the protests were.
The demonstrations, as well as public anger online, are the latest signs of building frustration with China’s intense approach to controlling COVID-19. It’s the only major country in the world that still is fighting the pandemic through mass testing and lockdowns.
Given China’s vast security apparatus, protests are risky anywhere in the country, but they are extraordinary in Xinjiang, which for years has been the target of a brutal security crackdown. A huge number of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim minorities have been swept into a vast network of camps and prisons, instilling fear that grips the region to this day.
Most of the protesters visible in the videos were Han Chinese. A Uyghur woman living in Urumqi said it was because Uyghurs were too scared to take to the streets despite their rage.
“Han Chinese people know they will not be punished if they speak against the lockdown,” she said, declining to be named for fear of retaliation against her family. “Uyghurs are different. If we dare say such things, we will be taken to prison or to the camps.”
In one video, which the AP could not independently verify, Urumqi’s top official, Yang Fasen, told angry protesters he would open up low-risk areas of the city the following morning.
That promise was realized the next day, as Urumqi authorities announced that residents of low risk areas would be allowed to move freely within their neighborhoods. Still, many other neighborhoods remain under lockdown.
Officials also triumphantly declared Saturday that they had basically achieved “societal zero-COVID,” meaning that there was no more community spread and that new infections were being detected only in people already under health monitoring, such as those in a centralized quarantine facility.
Social media users greeted the news with disbelief and sarcasm. “Only China can achieve this speed,” wrote one user on Weibo.
On Chinese social media, where trending topics are manipulated by censors, the “zero-COVID” announcement was the No. 1 trending hashtag on both Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, and Douyin, the Chinese edition of TikTok. The apartment fire and protests became a lightning rod for public anger, as millions shared posts questioning China’s pandemic controls or mocking the country’s stiff propaganda and harsh censorship controls.
The explosion of criticism marks a sharp turn in public opinion. Early on in the pandemic, China’s approach to controlling COVID-19 was hailed by its own citizens as minimizing deaths at a time when other countries were suffering devastating waves of infections. China’s leader Xi Jinping had held up the approach as an example of the superiority of the Chinese system in comparison to the West and especially the U.S., which had politicized the use of face masks and had difficulties enacting widespread lockdowns.
But support for “zero-COVID” has cratered in recent months, as tragedies sparked public anger. Last week, the Zhengzhou city government in the central province of Henan apologized for the death of a 4-month old baby. She died after a delay in receiving medical attention while suffering vomiting and diarrhea in quarantine at a hotel in Zhengzhou.
The government has doubled down its policy even as it loosens some measures, such as shortening quarantine times. The central government has repeatedly said it will stick to “zero COVID.”
Many in Xinjiang have been locked down since August. Most have not been allowed to leave their homes, and some have reported dire conditions, including spotty food deliveries that have caused residents to go hungry. On Friday, the city reported 220 new cases, the vast majority of which were asymptomatic.
The Uyghur woman in Urumqi said she had been trapped in her apartment since Aug. 8, and was not even allowed to open her window. On Friday, residents in her neighborhood defied the order, opening their windows and shouting in protest. She joined in.
“No more lockdowns! No more lockdowns!” they screamed.
Total Doses Distributed = 918,653,695. Total Doses Administered = 653,502,647. Number of People Receiving 1 or More Doses = 267,804,921. Number of People Fully Vaccinated = 228,390,445.
China is expanding lockdowns, including in a cental city where factory workers clashed this week with police, as its number of COVID-19 cases hit a daily record.
People in eight districts of Zhengzhou with a total of 6.6 million residents were told to stay home for five days beginning Thursday, except to buy food or get medical treatment. Daily mass testing was ordered in what the city government called a “war of annihilation” against the virus.
During clashes Tuesday and Wednesday, Zhengzhou police beat workers protesting over a pay dispute at the biggest factory for Apple’s iPhone.
Across China, the number of new cases reported in the past 24 hours was 31,444, the National Health Commission said Thursday. That is the highest daily figure since the coronavirus was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
The daily average of reported cases is steadily increasing. This week, authorities reported China’s first COVID-19 deaths in six months, bringing the total to 5,232.
While the numbers of cases and deaths are relatively low compared to the U.S. and other countries, China’s ruling Communist Party remains committed to its “zero-COVID” strategy that aims to isolate every case and eliminate the virus entirely while other governments end anti-virus controls and rely on vaccinations and immunity from past infections to prevent deaths and serious illness.
Businesses and residential communities from the manufacturing center of Guangzhou in the south to Beijing in the north have also been placed under various forms of lockdown, measures that particularly affects blue-collar migrant workers. In many cases, residents say the restrictions go beyond what the national government allows.
Guangzhou suspended access Monday to its Baiyun district of 3.7 million residents, while residents of some areas of Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million people southwest of Beijing, were told to stay home while mass testing is conducted.
Beijing this week opened a hospital in an exhibition center and suspended access to Beijing International Studies University after a virus case was found there. The capital earlier closed shopping malls and office buildings and suspended access to some apartment compounds.
The tightening came after the Communist party this month announced measures to try to reduce disruptions by shortening quarantines and making other changes.
The party is trying to contain the latest wave of outbreaks without shutting down factories and the rest of its economy as it did in early 2020. Its tactics include “closed-loop management,” under which workers live in their factories with no outside contact.
Economic growth rebounded to 3.9% over a year earlier in the three months ending in September, up from the first half’s 2.2%. But activity already was starting to fall back, and growth for the year is on track to fall well short of the government’s target of 5.5%.
Foxconn, the world’s biggest contract assembler of smartphones and other electronics, is struggling to fill orders for the iPhone 14 after thousands of employees walked away from the factory in Zhengzhou last month following complaints about unsafe working conditions.
Foxconn, based in Taiwan, said its contractual obligation about payments “has always been fulfilled.”
The company denied what it said were comments online that employees with the virus lived in dormitories at the Zhengzhou factory. It said facilities were disinfected and passed government checks before employees moved in.
Americans who got the updated COVID-19 booster shots are better protected against symptomatic infection than those who haven’t — at least for now, U.S. health officials said Tuesday.
Updated boosters rolled out by Pfizer and rival Moderna in September have been a hard sell for vaccine-weary Americans. Only about 13% of U.S. adults so far have gotten a “bivalent” shot that targets the omicron strain as well as the original coronavirus. On Tuesday, White House officials announced a renewed push for more Americans to get the latest shots.
In the first look at the new shots’ real-world effectiveness, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracked people with coronavirus-like symptoms who sought testing at drugstores around the country between September and early November. Researchers compared the vaccination status of those who wound up having COVID-19 with those who didn’t.
The new omicron-targeting booster added 30% to 56% protection against symptomatic infection, depending on how many prior vaccinations someone had, how long ago and their age, the CDC concluded.
People getting the greatest benefit are those who’d never had a prior booster, just two doses of the original COVID-19 vaccine at least eight months earlier, said CDC’s Dr. Ruth Link-Gelles, who led the study.
But even people who got a summertime booster of the original vaccine before seeking the new fall formula were 30% to 40% more protected than if they’d skipped this latest shot, she said.
“We think about it as the additional benefit or incremental benefit of getting one more dose, and in this case that one more dose is a bivalent,” Link-Gelles said.
The updated boosters target the BA.5 omicron strain that until recently was the most common type. The original COVID-19 vaccines have offered strong protection against severe disease and death no matter the variant, but protection against mild infection has proved temporary. CDC’s analysis tracked only the first few months of the new boosters’ use so it’s too early to know how long the added protection against symptomatic infection lasts.
But “certainly as we enter the holiday season, personally I would want the most possible protection if I’m seeing my parents and grandparents,” Link-Gelles said. “Protection against infection there is going to be really helpful, because you potentially would stop yourself from getting a grandparent or other loved one sick.”
To that end, the Biden administration announced a six-week campaign urging people — especially seniors — to get the boosters, saying the shots could save lives as Americans gather for the holidays.
Even protection against severe illness slipped when BA.5 was dominant, the reason health authorities have strongly urged older adults and others at high risk not to skip the new booster.
Adding to the uncertainty, the coronavirus still is mutating and now relatives of BA.5 are on the rise.
Earlier this fall, Pfizer and Moderna released lab tests showing that getting an updated booster revs up people’s levels of virus-fighting antibodies, including against BA.5. The companies point to preliminary antibody evidence that the new shots may offer at least some protection against the even newer omicron subtypes as well, despite not being an exact match.
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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.
