China is caught in a COVID-19 trap of its own making
Nancy Qian is a professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and is founding director of China Econ Lab and Northwestern’s China Lab.
For most of the past two years, China’s “zero-COVID” strategy was seen as a drastic but effective way to maintain impressively low infection rates. The Chinese government locked down millions of people at a time, ordering them to stay in their homes – or even in schools and office buildings. Last winter, the city of Xi’an wasfor an entire month, confining its 13 million residents to their homes, where they had minimal access to necessities such as food.
This extreme strategy has had negative unintended consequences, including restricted medical care for other illnesses, separated families, and various other economic and social disruptions – but it did keep COVID-19 infection rates low. Most people in China, and many observers elsewhere, viewed the costs as a worthwhile price to pay for sparing the broader population of 1.4 billion from the high mortality rates seen in countries like the United States.
China’s political leadership has found it very difficult to shift to a more moderate strategy, because that would invariably lead to more COVID-19 infections and deaths. Though the total numbers might never get as high as in the U.S., an increase of deaths into the thousands would be hard for people to accept now that they have been led to expect zero.
Moreover, that expectation has contributed to a low vaccination rate among elderly Chinese, many of whom
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