China: Fears of Covid-19 surge as curbs eased
BEIJING: China’s abrupt U-turn to ease stringent Covid curbs continued on Sunday as it relaxed more restrictions in cities including in Shanghai amid fears of a surge in infections as negative test requirements are slackened for accessing public transport and spaces across the country.
China reported 31,824 new Covid-19 infections and two new deaths on Sunday for the day before, the national health commission (NHC) said in its daily bulletin.
Shanghai, which went through its worst Covid outbreak and a hard lockdown earlier this year, will no longer require passengers to hold a negative nucleic acid test result to take public transportation including buses and subways from Monday. “The same rule is also applied to the entries of public outdoor spaces such as parks,” the local government announced, according to the China Daily newspaper.
Shanghai joins other populous cities like Beijing, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Tianjin in easing ‘zeroCovid’-related restrictions, a week after citizens came out to the streets, protesting against the strategy in a rare show of widespread public discontent.
The local government of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in China’s remote northwest, announced on Sunday that markets, restaurants and malls in the city will reopen from Monday, marking the end of nearly 100 days of lockdown.
It was in Urumqi that protests against the ‘zero-Covid’ policy first erupted after 10 people died in a fire in a Covid-restricted high-rise building on November 26.
The Chinese government has termed the rollback “optimisation” of Covid-19 prevention and control measures as the country gradually shifts from the ‘zeroCovid’ strategy, which had upended lives and impacted the economy, to a more flexible approach.
The sudden changes have fuelled confusion among the people about the new rules with many wondering whether nucleic acid tests or mandatory checking of health kits - a digital kit on mobile phones - had been totally done away with.
The Beijing government had to issue a statement on Saturday evening to quash rumours, which claimed all curbs were being scrapped.
“Cases and deaths will eventually surge and I don’t think there’s anything that could have been done to entirely prevent that all together. But still, I think there was a policy failure,” Katherine Mason, Associate Professor Anthropology, Brown University, said.
“The big mistake, in my view, is that the government missed its opportunity to capitalise on all the time they bought to make necessary preparations for an inevitable surge when Covid finally became impossible to contain,” Mason said, adding: “I don’t think it’s too late to do that, but they’ve (Chinese government) made it unnecessarily harder for themselves.”