China abandons zero-Covid policy, health experts warns dark days

• Zero-Covid policy destroyed the world’s second-largest economy.
• Beijing unveiled comprehensive adjustments to its harsh policies on Wednesday.
• New standards eliminate the required health QR code to enter most public areas.

China’s zero-Covid policy, which crippled the second-largest economy in the world and provoked an unprecedented wave of protests, is finally being undone as Beijing unveiled comprehensive adjustments to its harsh policies on Wednesday. Ultimately, these efforts failed to contain the virus.

The new standards eliminate the health QR code that had previously been required to enter most public areas and pull down mass testing, while maintaining some restrictions.

Additionally, they permit some Covid-19 sufferers and their close associates to avoid centralized quarantine.

They follow the recent beginning in a number of Chinese towns to relax some of the stringent regulations that for nearly three years dictated and severely constrained daily life in China.

Although the adjustments represent a significant shift and provide some public relief from the exorbitant expenses and requirements of zero-Covid, it is also obvious that China is ill-equipped to handle the potential increase in cases.

Although there is still a lot of uncertainty about how the upcoming weeks and months will play out, experts say China has not done enough to prepare, including increasing the vaccination rate for the elderly, expanding hospital capacity for emergency and intensive care, and stockpiling antiviral drugs.

Even though the Omicron variant is milder than previous strains and China’s overall vaccination rate is high, experts warn that if infections spread rapidly throughout the 1.4 billion-person nation, even a small number of severe cases among vulnerable and under-vaccinated groups like the elderly could overwhelm hospitals.

“This is a looming crisis – the timing is really bad … China now has to relax much of its measures during the winter (overlapping with flu season), so that was not as planned,” said Xi Chen, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health in the United States, pointing to what was likely an acceleration in China’s transition, triggered by public discontent.

After nationwide demonstrations against the zero-Covid policy late last month and three years after the first cases of Covid-19 were discovered in Wuhan, central China, the guidelines announced on Wednesday start a new chapter in the nation’s epidemic containment.

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