Curbs expose Xi’s failures

China has been so effective at imposing severe restrictions on its people, yet so ineffective at actually protecting them from the virus, leaving them more vulnerable than the rest of the world.

China’s policy of lockdowns has left it without the ‘soup of varied antibodies’ many countries have developed. Picture: Getty

Eventually, the virus wins. Three years ago, in a city few outside China had heard of, a new virus appeared.

Three months later it was clear that it was never going to disappear. Since the origins of the pandemic in Wuhan, there was only ever one purpose to lockdown: to buy time. Or, at least, that’s what most assumed was the purpose.

These days, Covid containment strategies are intensely political. In the post mortem of the pandemic, scientists and politicians can range on a spectrum from “zero Covid"-ites to Swedish “herd immunity"-ites. For most countries, though, zero Covid - maximal suppression of the virus - was not an ideology. It was a pragmatic response that, if you were blessed by being an island, worked well. In Australia, New Zealand and Singapore it allowed the economy to keep going until the vaccines arrived.

Yet there are still millions of people in China who will have been double-vaccinated and boosted and seen their protection from antibodies wane three times, without meeting the virus in the wild. The virus has had three years to change. It has become nimbler and wilier.

In the rest of the world, its spread, as well as the Delta variants, has given us “hybrid immunity”. In China, they have less a soup of antibodies than a single distilled flavour - from vaccines designed to repel a virus that no longer exists.

Only a country with the state apparatus of China could have hoped to have maintained rolling lockdowns so strictly, for so long, that it could persist with zero Covid. Why is President Xi doing it? Western scientists are increasingly bemused.

One answer is vaccination. According to the latest statistics, only 40 per cent of the over-80s have been fully vaccinated. But another reason China is still focused on prevention, not treatment, could be its lack of intensive care beds.

What is baffling to outside observers is that the same state that is so effective at imposing severe restrictions on its people is so ineffective at getting all of them vaccinated, or providing enough hospital beds.

The Times