Volunteers wearing protective suits package meals for delivery to people under lockdown in Xi'an in northwestern China's Shaanxi Province on Jan. 4.Zhang Bowen/The Associated Press
The number of new coronavirus infections is on the wane in Xi’an, a city in central China that has become emblematic of the country’s draconian zero-COVID policies in recent weeks. But even as officials in Xi’an prepare to ease restrictions, other cities are once again shutting things down.
New clusters of cases have been reported in Zhejiang and Henan provinces. The latter has already shut its borders, and there are fears the Lunar New Year travel period, which begins next week, could result in more infections – and more lockdowns.
“I didn’t dare send news I saw from Xi’an to my family because I didn’t want to increase their psychological burden,” said Gao Xiaoyi, a finance worker from Henan. “The most important thing for Chinese people is the reunion” of families to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
Ms. Gao grew up in Zhengzhou, a city now edging toward lockdown after an outbreak in nearby Yuzhou. “My parents didn’t tell me about the situation because they didn’t want to distract me,” she said. “I didn’t know until I saw the news today that the number of new cases suddenly increased.”
China has maintained a tough zero-COVID strategy since early in the pandemic, sporadically locking down whole neighbourhoods and even cities to stamp out infection. While this has proven effective at keeping COVID-19 numbers down, it has led to widespread misery for those affected, particularly in border areas, where preventing the virus from entering the country is a daily battle.
The number of confirmed cases in Xi’an since the latest outbreak began on Dec. 9 is less than 2,000 in a city of some 13 million people. By way of comparison, there have been more than 3,200 cases in Toronto, which has fewer than three million residents, in just the past week.
As well as trying to prevent the virus from spreading during the Lunar New Year, known as the Spring Festival in China, the government is also concerned about next month’s Winter Olympics in Beijing. The Tokyo Games last summer were dogged by fears they would be cancelled owing to a spike in cases in Japan.
“There’s a definite sense of fear, especially with Spring Festival coming up and the amount of people that will be travelling,” said Erin Zhang, a business development executive in Shanghai. “I would not be surprised if multiple cities went into lockdown” after the holiday.
In late December, as the number of cases began to spike in Xi’an, multiple officials were fired for “insufficient rigour” in enforcing coronavirus protocols, which could explain why the city subsequently went into overdrive with restrictions, enforcing the strictest and largest lockdown since that of Wuhan, the original epicentre of the pandemic.
Millions of people have been confined to their homes for two weeks, and there have been reports of families running out of food after being given little time to stockpile. The government promised free deliveries, but those did not pan out. Tens of thousands have been quarantined in hastily expanded facilities, while people seeking medical help for reasons other than COVID-19, even emergencies, have reported being sent away from hospitals overwhelmed by the spike in infections.
In the most shocking case, a woman who was eight months pregnant was refused entry to Xi’an Gaoxin Hospital for two hours because she could not test negative for the virus. She was eventually admitted after staff saw she was bleeding – she had suffered a miscarriage. After widespread outrage online, several hospital officials “were disciplined for their poor anti-virus performance,” state media reported Thursday.
Ms. Gao said “it’s hard to believe that something like this happens today.
“Xi’an is the capital [of Shaanxi province], but no one expected such chaos in such a big city,” she added. “It tells us that the glory of a city being the capital doesn’t necessarily help its people.”
Several commentators linked the situation in Xi’an to problems with local governance in China, where officials are often handed strict targets by Beijing or provincial governments but lack the power or flexibility to easily hit them. “Higher levels delegate a lot of responsibilities, but often without also delegating the requisite rights (and finances) to meet these responsibilities, leaving localities fending for themselves,” China studies professor Christian Goebel of the University of Vienna wrote in a widely shared analysis. “If it works out, the centre takes the credit. If it doesn’t, local officials are blamed and given the boot.”
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently tweeted that “in localities with relatively low state capacity, local officials concerned about their career prospects are more likely to turn to one-size-fits-all draconian measures (e.g., indiscriminate full lockdown) in implementing zero Covid strategy.”
Speaking this week, Zeng Guang, a member of China’s National Health Commission, said the outbreak in Xi’an was likely driven by the Delta variant, adding that officials in the city “lost control at an early stage.” The more transmissible Omicron variant is not yet widespread in China owing to the country’s tough border quarantines.
That Delta made it into China suggests Omicron, too, will eventually slip past the controls, however. This is particularly alarming because research has suggested that Sinovac, the most commonly used vaccine in China, is not effective against Omicron without a booster, though two doses still prevent serious illness in most patients.
Chinese officials have stridently defended the country’s zero-COVID approach, and reversing course at this stage could be disastrous: A recent study by researchers at Peking University found that, were China to lift its pandemic controls and pursue a “living with COVID” strategy similar to those of many other countries, it “would have a devastating impact on the medical system of China and cause a great disaster within the nation.”
While there was widespread sympathy for the residents of Xi’an online, there were also signs of anger. The Wuhan lockdown occurred at the start of the pandemic, when there were no vaccines or an effective treatment plan. Today, some 80 per cent of China’s population is vaccinated, and testing and treatment protocols are firmly in place, leading many to wonder why such strict measures were still necessary.
Ms. Zhang said that seeing the rest of the world living with the coronavirus has made her less worried about infection than getting caught up in a lockdown or endless testing. She said she and her friends don’t “really talk about catching COVID, we talk about quarantine measures and how intense they are and how stressful it all is.”
Alexandra Li contributed to this report from Beijing
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