Fears of deadly infection surge as China abandons zero-Covid policy

The portable PCR testing booth dangled in the air over a dark Beijing street, captured on camera as it was winched away by a crane in the middle of the night. The image spread rapidly across Chinese social media, the perfect symbol of the bewilderingly rapid end of a draconian era.

In the face of the most widespread national protests since the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square demonstrators in 1989, the Chinese government has abruptly abandoned its flagship zero-Covid policy.

For nearly three years the authorities have battled to keep Covid out of the country, using every tool of technology, mass mobilisation and repression at their disposal, regardless of the tragic costs to individuals and the terrible damage to the national economy.

After years of telling its citizens that the only way to stay safe from Covid was to avoid it entirely, the policy pivot required a new message. Beijing has opted for presenting the prevailing Omicron variant as a less lethal version of the original disease.

Xi told visiting European Council president Charles Michel that China could look at easing restrictions because Omicron is less dangerous than the Delta variant, which was most common before.

Omicron has proved less deadly as it spread across countries such as Britain, but by the time it had become dominant, about 95% of the UK population had some form of antibodies from vaccines or previous infections, Bauld said.

Doctors and hospitals were overwhelmed in 2020 as the disease swept through the city of Wuhan at the start of the pandemic and the grim scenes of those early days could be repeated if the virus surges through an unprotected population.

A spring outbreak in Hong Kong, which has a much stronger healthcare system, offers a grim forecast of what China could face if it mishandles opening up.

In the largely unvaccinated elderly population, death rates were similar to those in the UK during the first wave of the pandemic, Julian Tang, a clinical virologist at Leicester University, said in the British Medical Journal in March.

The Chinese government has launched a vaccination drive targeted at older citizens, but China is using only domestically developed vaccines, which guard less effectively against Covid than western alternatives.

However the shift from zero Covid to living with Covid goes, one aspect of the next few months and years is certain. Xi will aim to take credit for any success and suppress or shift blame for any failures.

The protests showed how many people in China are able to evade censorship and are willing to risk the punishment of an authoritarian state, but they have not been reported inside the country.