Authorities in southern China apologized for breaking into the homes of people quarantined for being suspected of contracting COVID-19 in the latest example of heavy-handed measures that have sparked a rare public backlash.
The Communist Party newspaper Global Times reported Tuesday that 84 homes of people sent for isolation in Guangzhou city’s Liwan district were opened in an effort to find close contacts remaining inside and to disinfect the premises.
The doors were later sealed and new locks installed, the paper reported.
The district government apologized for such “oversimplified and violent” behavior, the paper said. An investigation team has been set up to investigate and “relevant people” will be severely punished, it said.
China’s leadership has maintained its hard-line “zero-COVID” policy despite the mounting economic costs and disruption to the lives of ordinary citizens, who continue to be subjected to routine testing and quarantines, even while the rest of the world has opened up to living with the disease.
Numerous cases of police and health workers breaking into homes around China in the name of anti-COVID-19 measures have been documented on social media. In some, doors have been broken down and residents threatened with punishment, even when they tested negative for the virus. Authorities have demanded keys to lock in residents of apartment buildings where cases have been detected, steel barriers erected to prevent them leaving their compounds and iron bars welded over doors.
China’s Communist leaders exert stringent control over the government, police and levers of social control. Most citizens are inured to a lack of privacy and restrictions on free speech and the right to assembly.
However, the strict anti-COVID-19 measures have tested that tolerance, particularly in Shanghai, where a ruthless and often chaotic lockdown spurred protests online and in person among those unable to access food, health care and basic necessities.
Authorities in Beijing have taken a gentler approach, concerned with prompting unrest in the capital ahead of a key party congress later this year at which president and party leader Xi Jinping is expected to receive a third five-year term amid radically slower economic growth and high unemployment among college graduates and migrant workers. A requirement that only vaccinated people could enter public spaces was swiftly canceled last week after city residents denounced it as having been announced without warning and unfair to those who have not had their shots.
“Zero-COVID” has been justified as necessary to avoid a wider outbreak among a population that has had relatively little exposure to the virus and less natural immunity. Although China’s vaccination rate hovers at around 90%, it is considerably lower among the elderly, while questions have been raised about the efficacy of China’s domestically produced vaccines.
Although China’s Fosun Pharma reached an agreement to distribute, and eventually manufacture, the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech, it still has not been cleared for use in mainland China, despite being authorized for use by separate authorities in Hong Kong and Macao.
Studies have consistently shown that inoculation with mRNA vaccines offers the best protection against hospitalization and death from COVID-19. Chinese vaccines made with older technology proved fairly effective against the original strain of the virus, but much less so against more recent variants.
Now health experts say the delay in approving mRNA vaccines — a consequence of placing politics and national pride above public health — could lead to avoidable coronavirus deaths and deeper economic losses.
China’s national borders remain largely closed and although domestic tourism has picked up, travel around the country remains subject to an array of regulations, with quarantine restrictions constantly in flux.
In one recent incident, some 2,000 visitors to the southern tourist hub of Beihai have been forced to prolong their stays after more than 500 cases were found and they were barred from leaving.
The local government was struggling to find hotel rooms for those who had already prepared to return home, while hotels and airlines were providing refunds for those who had booked holidays to the city that had to be canceled.
China regulates travel and access to public places through a health code app on citizens’ smartphones that must be updated with regular testing. The app tracks a person’s movements as a form of contact tracing, allowing a further imposition of public monitoring.
The measures remain in place despite relatively low rates of infection. The National Health Commission on Tuesday announced just 699 new cases of domestic transmission detected over the previous 24 hours, the bulk of which were asymptomatic.
Despite a year of disruptions, students largely made academic gains this past year that paralleled their growth pre-pandemic and outpaced the previous school year, according to new research released Tuesday from NWEA, a nonprofit research group that administers standardized tests.
Gains across income levels partially closed the gap in learning that resulted from the pandemic, researchers found. But students in high-poverty schools had fallen further behind, making it likely they will need more time than their higher-income peers to make a full recovery.
The results are a measured sign of hope for academic recovery from COVID-19. But sustained effort and investment in education remain crucial.
“These signs of rebounding are especially heartening during another challenging school year of more variants, staff shortages, and a host of uncertainties. We think that speaks volumes to the tremendous effort put forth by our schools to support students,” Karyn Lewis, director of the Center for School and Student Progress at NWEA, and the study’s co-author, said in a statement.
The study used data from more than 8 million students who took the MAP Growth assessment in reading and math during the three school years impacted by COVID. Those numbers were then compared with data from three years before the pandemic.
The study found that if rebounding occurs at the same pace it did in the 2021-2022 school year, the timeline for a full recovery would likely reach beyond the 2024 deadline for schools to spend their federal funds.
For the average elementary school student, researchers projected it would take three years to reach where they would have been without the pandemic. For older students, recovery could take much longer. Across grade levels, subject and demographic groups, the exact timeline can vary widely and researchers found most students will need more than the two years where increased federal funding is available.
Some of the most successful interventions for students involved increasing instructional time, ranging from more class time, intensive tutoring, or high-quality summer programming, said Lindsay Dworkin, senior vice president for policy and communications at NWEA. But those initiatives can be costly and complex, and districts may hesitate to implement them when recovery funds have a fast-approaching deadline to be spent.
“The funding expires in such a short amount of time that districts are really struggling with, ‘What can I do that will be big and impactful and I only need to do for two years?’” Dworkin said in an interview. “I think if they knew that there would be more federal money coming and that it would be sustained, that would make all the difference both in the kind of creativity we would see from states and districts.”
Dworkin also said that while the study looked at national trends, understanding the unique and specific local context was essential to figuring out how to best support children in schools. In addition to variation across student groups, districts that share similar characteristics, such as demographics and poverty levels, still showed large variation in student outcomes.
“If you are a district leader, there’s just no national story that is going to tell you enough about your district context, without the hard work of digging into the data and understanding what it says and then tailoring the interventions to match,” Dworkin said.
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Ma covers education and equity for AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/anniema15
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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.
The Chinese gambling enclave of Macao on Saturday extended its lockdown by five days as it grapples with the biggest outbreak of the coronavirus in over two years.
Authorities said that industries and commercial companies will remain closed until July 23. The lockdown, which began July 11, had initially been set to expire Sunday.
As part of the lockdown, authorities have suspended dine-in services and ordered all residents to avoid leaving their homes unless absolutely necessary. Those who need to go out must wear KN95 masks or similar.
The city, which has a population of 680,000, recorded 31 infections on Friday. Since its latest outbreak that began June 18, the city has reported some 1,700 infections.
The government also said in a separate statement that it would allocate 10 billion patacas ($1.24 billion) as handouts for businesses affected by the outbreak.
Casinos, which are the city’s largest employers and the main income generator for the government, were initially allowed to operate in spite of the flare in cases in June but have since been ordered to close as part of the lockdown last week.
The British government said Friday that everyone 50 or over will be offered a fourth dose of coronavirus vaccine in the fall, lowering the age threshold from the previously announced 65.
The Department of Health said it had accepted advice from the U.K.’s independent vaccines adviser about the autumn booster program.
Fourth doses will also be given to health care workers, nursing home staff and residents, and all those aged 5 and up with health conditions that make them more vulnerable to severe illness from COVID-19.
Most of the same groups will also get a free flu shot.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the booster campaign would “keep our defenses strong over autumn and winter.”
“Vaccines were our way out of this pandemic, and now they will make sure COVID can never haunt us in the same way again,” he said.
Like many European countries, Britain is experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases, driven by the ultra-contagious BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants of the omicron strain. The Office for National Statistics estimates that 1 in 19 people in England had the virus in the week ending July 6.
The U.K. has one of Europe’s highest official death tolls in the pandemic, with almost 178,000 confirmed deaths of people who tested positive.
The mayor of Poland’s capital, Warsaw, said Friday he has COVID-19. Again.
Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski said on Twitter the virus seems to be “even more treacherous and contagious” then before and its symptoms are far from banal. Last year he was hospitalized due to a coronavirus infection.
He appealed to the Poles not to ignore the threat of potential reinfection. Trzaskowski, an opposition figure, also criticized Poland’s right-wing government for having taken no preventive steps of late to counter new variants.
The Health Ministry estimates the level of immunity in this nation of 38 million is above 90% due to inoculations, more than 54 million jabs, and to the resilience of those who have recovered from the disease. Nationwide measures are to be introduced when the number of those hospitalized for COVID-19 reaches 5,000.
But experts are saying the new variant is highly contagious and steps against its spreading should be taken now. The number of new registered infections was almost 2,000 on Friday and two people have died, while a week ago it was just over 1,000 new cases and no deaths.
About 25 million children worldwide have missed out on routine immunizations against common diseases like diptheria, largely because the coronavirus pandemic disrupted regular health services or triggered misinformation about vaccines, according to the U.N.
In a new report published Friday, the World Health Organization and UNICEF said their figures show 25 million children last year failed to get vaccinated against diptheria, tetanus and pertussis, a marker for childhood immunization coverage, continuing a downward trend that began in 2019.
“This is a red alert for child health,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s Executive Director.
“We are witnessing the largest sustained drop in childhood immunization in a generation,” she said, adding that the consequences would be measured in lives lost.
Data showed the vast majority of the children who failed to get immunized were living in developing countries, namely Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines. While vaccine coverage fell in every world region, the worst effects were seen in East Asia and the Pacific.
Experts said this “historic backsliding” in vaccination coverage was especially disturbing since it was occurring as rates of severe malnutrition were rising. Malnourished children typically have weaker immune systems and infections like measles can often prove fatal to them.
“The convergence of a hunger crisis with a growing immunization gap threatens to create the conditions for a child survival crisis,” the U.N. said.
Scientists said low vaccine coverage rates had already resulted in preventable outbreaks of diseases like measles and polio. In March 2020, WHO and partners asked countries to suspend their polio eradication efforts amid the accelerating COVID-19 pandemic. There have since been dozens of polio epidemics in more than 30 countries.
“This is particularly tragic as tremendous progress was made in the two decades before the COVID pandemic to improve childhood vaccination rates globally,” said Helen Bedford, a professor of children’s health at University College London, who was not connected to the U.N. report. She said the news was shocking but not surprising, noting that immunization services are frequently an “early casualty” of major social or economic disasters.
Dr. David Elliman, a consultant pediatrician at Britain’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, said it was critical to reverse the declining vaccination trend among children.
“The effects of what happens in one part of the world can ripple out to affect the whole globe,” he said in a statement, noting the rapid spread of COVID-19 and more recently, monkeypox. “Whether we act on the basis of ethics or ‘enlightened self interest’, we must put (children) top of our list of priorities.”
