WHO chief warns that China’s zero-Covid strategy is not sustainable – Financial Times

The head of the World Health Organization has warned that China’s zero-Covid strategy is unsustainable, as new modelling showed the country risked unleashing a “tsunami” of coronavirus infections and causing 1.6mn deaths if it abandons the policy.

“As we all know, the virus is evolving, changing its behaviours, becoming more transmissible. With that changing behaviour, changing your measures will be very important. When we talk about the zero-Covid strategy, we don’t think it’s sustainable,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday.

He said the WHO had discussed the issue with Chinese experts, adding that “considering the behaviour of the virus I think a shift [in China’s strategy] will be very important”.

The remarks came as modelling projections by researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University estimated that an unchecked surge of the Omicron coronavirus variant could result in 112mn symptomatic infections, 2.7mn intensive care admissions and almost 1.6mn fatalities between May and July.

The study, published in the scientific journal Nature, underscored fears that China would be hit hard by a large Omicron wave if restrictions were eased, because of its low vaccine uptake among older groups and reliance on less effective jabs.

The researchers also said that, given the fast-spreading nature of Omicron, “whether and for how long a zero-Covid policy can remain in place is questionable”.

According to the study, demand for intensive care beds would exceed capacity by more than 15 times at the peak of the outbreak. Unvaccinated individuals were estimated to account for three-quarters of the 1.6mn projected deaths, despite making up about one-eighth of the population.

China has recorded 763,845 Covid-19 cases and 555 deaths from the start of March to May 9, but some experts have questioned the reliability of the data.

The researchers stressed that while China’s vaccination rates were “insufficient” to prevent an Omicron surge overwhelming hospitals, access to vaccination and antiviral therapies for vulnerable groups alongside non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as testing and mask-wearing, “should be points of emphasis in future mitigation policies”.

Since Omicron began spreading in China in March, authorities have stuck to the zero-Covid policy in an effort to contain the outbreak. Confirmed cases and their close contacts have been sent to centralised quarantine facilities, mass testing has been rolled out and 41 cities are under full or partial lockdown measures, according to estimates by Nomura.

Chinese state media has emphasised the risk of a large number of deaths to justify the lockdowns as people grow weary of being kept inside. Shanghai, the financial capital, has been under draconian curbs for more than a month.

Professor Marco Ajelli, an infectious disease modeller at Indiana University’s School of Public Health who contributed to the study, said China could “chart a path away from zero-Covid” by vaccinating more elderly people and using a western-made shot instead of the less effective homegrown Sinovac and Sinopharm jabs.

Only 61.5 per cent of over-60s in China had received a third dose by May 5, according to official figures.

If Covid cases were to spread unmitigated, the outcomes would vary dramatically between different regions, according to the modelling data. Shanghai, which has one of the lowest levels of vaccine uptake among the elderly, was projected to suffer 1.79 deaths per 1,000 inhabitants, while the eastern coastal province of Shandong, which has a much higher uptake, was projected to have 0.84 deaths per 1,000 people.

Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong who was not involved in the study, stressed that the projections “should not be read as [a] recommendation to continue with zero-Covid”.

“In many ways, zero-Covid was a cause rather than an effect of the low vaccine coverage in the elderly. The zero-Covid approach caused older people to be reluctant to get vaccinated because they didn’t see the need or the urgency,” he added.

Additional reporting by Eleanor Olcott in Taipei