The first thing you have to understand is that Covid-19 in China is very different from Covid-19 in the U.S. and other Western nations.
It’s the same virus, and in China as elsewhere close proximity of people facilitates its spread. But it’s much harder to contain in the most populous and crowded country on earth.
We’re spread out more than they are, and more isolated from each other. The majority of Americans live in single-family homes, and our elderly generally don’t live with relatives of working or school age.
That’s not the case in China, where urban dwellers live in apartment blocks, and households typically are multigenerational. Grandparents usually live with their children and grandchildren, crammed together in small quarters, and families aren’t kept apart by yard space or acreage. Their public spaces, too, are more crowded. It all adds up to a lot more interpersonal exposure.
They also have two other big problems. One, they rely on homegrown vaccines that aren’t has effective as ours; and two, their health care system is much less able to handle mass infections; in particular, they lack critical-care hospital beds.
The top priority of Beijing’s leadership is to keep the Communist Party, and themselves, in power. They understood that a runaway pandemic and mass deaths in China could — and likely would — threaten their grip on power. A government that can’t protect its citizens isn’t long for this world (this was partly the rationale behind bombing enemy civilians in World War 2).
Given a combination of dictatorial power over their population, and a very limited ability to respond to mass infections, coupled with fear of what could happen to the regime if illness and deaths ran out of control, it’s hardly surprising that Beijing’s rulers opted for prevention through draconian lockdowns. Hence their “Zero Covid” policy, under which a single Covid-19 case could lock down an entire city, trapping people in their apartments, sometimes without food.
The restrictions were so onerous they provoked mass protects, in the face of which the regime backed down, scrapping the “Zero Covid” policy and removing nearly all restrictions. Not too surprisingly, they now have an exploding infection rate, which Beijing apparently has accepted as a lesser evil than continuing protests and a possible toppling of the regime.
It remains to be seen whether they can get it under some semblance of control, and what the death toll is going to be, but overall it’s not a pretty picture. The U.S. and other western nations are responding to the unfolding Covid-19 crisis in China by restricting travelers from there, who will have to test negative for Covid to gain entry.
NBC News reports, “Federal officials expressed concern that China’s past ‘zero-Covid’ policies could lead to a large number of hospitalizations and deaths there now that it has dropped most measures and its population may lack immunity to the currently circulating omicron subvariants” (see story here).
The U.S. offered “support and assistance, including vaccine doses” to China, but Beijing replied thanks but no thanks. There’s undoubtedly geopolitics going on there; the people plotting moves against Taiwan and a forcible takeover of the South China Sea don’t want to be beholden to us.
A major Covid-19 outbreak in China will affect the global economy. Disruptions there will impair the flow of export goods and slow demand for imports like iron ore from Australia and oil from the Middle East. You’ll have to wait longer for a new iPhone, and cheap t-shirts may disappear from mall stores.
But the worst impact may be on the pandemic’s future course here. China, as a populous and crowded country, is an ideal incubator for new variants. And that’s the last thing anyone wants to import from China.