BEIJING, 21 Mar: When China suddenly scrapped onerous zero-COVID measures in December, the country wasn\u2019t ready for a massive onslaught of cases, with hospitals turning away ambulances and crematoriums burning bodies around the clock.
\nChinese state media claimed the decision to open up was based on \u201cscientific analysis and shrewd calculation,\u201d and \u201cby no means impulsive.\u201d But in reality, China\u2019s ruling Communist Party ignored repeated efforts by top medical experts to kickstart exit plans until it was too late, The Associated Press found.
\nInstead, the reopening came suddenly at the onset of winter, when the virus spreads most easily. Many older people weren\u2019t vaccinated, pharmacies lacked antivirals, and hospitals didn\u2019t have adequate supplies or staff \u2014 leading to as many as hundreds of thousands of deaths that may have been avoided, according to academic modeling, more than 20 interviews with current and former China Center for Disease Control and Prevention employees, experts and government advisers, and internal reports and directives obtained by the AP.
\n\u201cIf they had a real plan to exit earlier, so many things could have been avoided,\u201d said Zhang Zuo-Feng, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. \u201cMany deaths could have been prevented.\u201d
\nExperts estimate that many hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, may have died in China\u2019s wave of COVID-19 \u2014 far higher than the official toll of under 90,000, but still a much lower death rate than in Western countries. However, 200,000 to 300,000 deaths could have been prevented if the country was better vaccinated and stocked with antivirals, according to modeling by the University of Hong Kong. Some scientists estimate even more lives could have been saved.
\n\u201cIt wasn\u2019t a sound public health decision at all,\u201d said a China CDC official, declining to be named to speak candidly on a sensitive matter. \u201cIt\u2019s absolutely bad timing \u2026 this was not a prepared opening.\u201d
\nFor two years, China stood out for its tough but successful controls against the virus, credited with saving millions of lives as other countries struggled with stop-and-start lockdowns. But with the emergence of the highly infectious omicron variant in late 2021, many of China\u2019s top medical experts and officials worried zero-COVID was unsustainable.
\nIn late 2021, China\u2019s leaders began discussing how to lift restrictions. As early as March 2022, top medical experts submitted a detailed reopening strategy to the State Council, China\u2019s cabinet. The existence of the document is being reported for the first time by the AP.
\nBut discussions were silenced after an outbreak the same month in Shanghai, which prompted Chinese leader Xi Jinping to lock the city down. Chinese public health experts stopped speaking publicly about preparing for an exit, as they were wary of openly challenging a policy supported by Xi.
\nBy the time the Shanghai outbreak was under control, China was months away from the 20th Party Congress, the country\u2019s most important political meeting in a decade, making reopening politically difficult. So the country stuck to mass testing and quarantining millions of people.
\n\u201cEverybody waits for the party congress,\u201d said one medical expert, declining to be named to comment on a sensitive topic. \u201cThere\u2019s inevitably a degree of everyone being very cautious.\u201d
\nAt the Congress in mid-October, top officials differing with Xi were sidelined. Instead, six loyalists followed Xi onstage in a new leadership lineup, signaling his total domination of the party.
\nWith the congress over, some voices in the public health sector finally piped up. In an internal document published Oct. 28, obtained by The Associated Press and reported here for the first time, Wu Zunyou, China\u2019s CDC chief epidemiologist, criticized the Beijing city government for excessive COVID-19 controls, saying it had \u201cno scientific basis.\u201d He called it a \u201cdistortion\u201d of the central government\u2019s zero-COVID policy, which risked \u201cintensifying public sentiment and causing social dissatisfaction.\u201d
\nAt the same time, he called the virus policies of the central government \u201cabsolutely correct.\u201d One former CDC official said Wu felt helpless because he was ordered to advocate for zero-COVID in public, even as he disagreed at times with its excesses in private.
\nWu did not respond to an email requesting comment. A person acquainted with Wu confirmed he wrote the internal report. (AP)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BEIJING, 21 Mar: When China suddenly scrapped onerous zero-COVID measures in December, the country wasn\u2019t ready for a massive onslaught of cases, with hospitals turning away ambulances and crematoriums burning bodies around the clock. Chinese state media claimed the decision to open up was based on \u201cscientific analysis and shrewd calculation,\u201d and \u201cby no means […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-213292","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}