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--China Returns to Its Strict Covid Limits toFight a New Outbreak
Foreign businesses worry that toughquarantines and restrictions could persist into next year as Beijing struggleswith variants and questions about its vaccines.
BEIJING — Neighborhoods under strictlockdown. Thousands quarantined. Millions tested in mere days. Overseasarrivals locked up for weeks and sometimes months.
China has followed variations of thatformula for dealing with the coronavirus for more than a year — and a newoutbreak suggests that they could be part of Chinese life for some time tocome.
China appeared to get the coronavirus undercontrol nearly a year ago. But hundreds of millions of Chinese people remainunvaccinated. New variants of the coronavirus have appeared, and questionsremain about whether China’s self-made vaccines can stop them.
The latest cases have been found inGuangzhou, capital of the southern province of Guangdong. The authorities haveblamed the Delta variant, which has caused widespread loss of life in India.
The city tested practically its entirepopulation of 18.7 million between Sunday and Tuesday, some of them for thesecond time. It has also put neighborhoods with a total of more than 180,000residents into total lockdowns, with practically no one allowed out except formedical testing.
The early infections appear to have jumpedfrom person to person at a cluster of eateries. Each infected person hasinfected more people than in any previous outbreak that China has confronted,Zhang Zhoubin, deputy director of the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control,said at a news conference.
“The epidemic faced by Guangzhou this timeis an unprecedented opponent, and it requires more resolute and decisivemeasures to deal with it,” he said.
Test facilities in Guangzhou have beenoperating around the clock. Lines are long. Residents wake early to try to beatthe rush, but still find delays.
Mandy Li, a longtime resident of the city’sLiwan District, where most of the infections have occurred, said she set heralarm clock for 3:30 a.m. She still had to wait an hour.
“In the queue, there was a family of three,”she said. “Some woke their kids to line up, and some had strollers. Buteveryone was cooperative and quiet, as we know some volunteers and medicalworkers worked very hard and they’ve been there all this time without rest.”
China’s approach has evolved since thecoronavirus first emerged, when Beijing initially put harsh restrictions onhundreds of millions of people. Today its lockdowns are focused onneighborhoods rather than cities or provinces. China has made vaccination thecenterpiece of its strategy.
Still, many of the core tenets remain for ahuge and densely populated country: vast testing, strict limits on movement andintense scrutiny of arrivals from other countries.
Foreign businesses have worried that thoselimits on international travelers could snarl their plans. A European UnionChamber of Commerce survey released this week found that three-quarters ofmember companies said they had been adversely affected by travel restrictions,usually by hindering them from bringing in key engineers or executives.
Beijing has demanded that travelers fromdozens of countries spend two weeks in employer-supervised quarantine evenbefore flying to China. Once there, travelers must spend at least two weeks andsometimes three or longer in government-supervised quarantine, even if they arefully vaccinated. Rounds of tests can turn up a possibly false positive,leading to more tests and additional days or weeks in isolation.
A German national who flew into Shanghailast month said that he had been sent to a hospital isolation room for threedays because he tested positive for antibodies, which he attributed to taking asecond vaccine dose 16 days earlier.
Nurses took his blood twice a day andperformed six throat swabs, four nasal swabs and two anal swabs daily, said theGerman, who insisted on anonymity to avoid offending the authorities. Thehospital room had no towels, no toilet paper and no television, and the bed wasa steel plate with a thin mat, he said.
Doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed bySinovac being produced at a factory in Beijing last year. Most Chinese have notbeen fully vaccinated.Credit...Wang Zhao/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The German said that, after consistentlytesting negative for the virus, he was allowed to spend the remaining 11 daysof isolation in a government-supervised quarantine center.
Many businesses expect that China may retainstringent travel restrictions through February, when Beijing will host theWinter Olympics, and possibly through autumn of next year, when the ChineseCommunist Party will hold its party congress.
Many foreigners in China face a choice: Ifthey leave to visit spouses, children and other family members elsewhere, theymay be unable to re-enter the country later because of the pandemicrestrictions.
“There is absolutely a growing fatigue for alot of the foreigners who are here,” said Jacob Gunter, senior policy andcommunications manager at the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China.
At home, China’s leaders are pushing itspeople to get vaccinated. It has administered about 800 million doses by thegovernment’s count, compared with 300 million administered in the UnitedStates. Yin Weidong, the chairman and chief executive of Sinovac Biotech, oneof China’s main vaccine manufacturers, told state television last Friday thatChinese regulators had approved the emergency use of vaccines in children asyoung as 3.
Still, administering 800 million doses —almost all of the vaccines require two shots — means most of China’s 1.4billion people have not been fully vaccinated. Some people remain hesitant toget the shots, and Chinese media outlets have used the Guangzhou outbreak toencourage skeptics to get inoculated.
The spread of the virus has raised freshquestions about the effectiveness of China’s vaccines, particularly againstvariants. The Seychelles last month and now Mongolia in the past three weekshave both had large numbers of infections despite high vaccination rates. Bothhave used the Sinopharm vaccine from China, although the Seychelles also reliedpartly on AstraZeneca vaccines.
The Delta variant now circulating inGuangzhou has also shown the ability in other countries to infect some peoplewho had already been vaccinated, a phenomenon known as vaccine escape. Researchelsewhere has found that to be a particular problem for people who havereceived only a first injection of a two-jab vaccine and are then exposed tothe Delta variant.
Researchers in Britain have found thatreceiving only the first of two shots of the Oxford-AstraZeneca orPfizer-BioNTech vaccines may be only 30 percent effective in preventinginfection with the Delta variant, said Raina MacIntyre, who heads thebiosecurity program at the Kirby Institute of the University of New South Walesin Sydney, Australia.
After two doses, effectiveness appears torise to 60 percent with the AstraZeneca vaccine and 88 percent withPfizer-BioNTech. “With the degree of vaccine escape there is with the Deltavariant, you really do need people to be fully vaccinated,” she said.
Mr. Yin, of Sinovac, told China’s state-runtelevision on Saturday that a third shot of his company’s vaccine produces atenfold increase in antibodies within a week. But Chinese vaccine manufacturersare not yet recommending a third dose.
“As far as China is concerned, in fact,completing the two-shot immunization is the most important task for all thepublic,” he said.
In the meantime, Guangzhou has tried to turnits virus setback into a showcase for local technologies. Officials there saidthey had used 31 driverless shuttle vans and trucks to send food and othercritical supplies into locked down neighborhoods to avoid exposing deliverypersonnel.
By Tuesday, Guangdong Province had 157people in hospital with the virus and was announcing about 10 new cases perday. The province and also Guangzhou itself have banned anyone since lastweekend from leaving unless they have a valid reason and a negative nucleicacid test for the virus within the preceding 48 hours.
Unlike many places around the world, Guangzhouat least does not have to worry about running out of pandemic supplies: It iscoincidentally a hub for manufacturing and exporting them. Chen Jianhua, chiefeconomist of the Guangzhou Bureau of Industry and Information Technology, saidat a news conference on Wednesday that the city’s daily production capacity was91 million masks and seven million sets of coronavirus detection chemicals.
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