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In Shenzhen, one of the world’s most important technology and manufacturing centres, all it took was 35 coronavirus cases for officials lock down swaths of the city of 17.5mn people.
Since Sunday, partial lockdowns, mass testing campaigns, public transport suspensions and school closures have been imposed across a number of Chinese cities, including Chengdu in the south-west and Harbin and Tianjin in the north-east.
Yet experts believe President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy will continue into 2023, until Chinese scientists develop vaccine technology to stop Covid-19 from spreading or for a dominant mutation to emerge with significantly less severe health consequences than the Omicron variant.
“It will require some miracles,” said Chen Long, a partner at Beijing-based consultancy Plenum.
“They’re hoping for a ‘super vaccine’ that’s going to be much more effective than the current ones anywhere in the world. Or, for the virus to evolve and becomes less fatal.
” But Xi’s relentless efforts to rid China of the coronavirus are taking a huge economic toll.
The zero-Covid’s policy’s impact on consumer sending will shave 1.6-2 percentage points off gross domestic product growth this year, according to an analysis by French bank Natixis, based on a calculation of retail sales and intracity mobility compared with pre-pandemic levels.
That will pile the pressure on Beijing’s economic planners as they chase Beijing’s GDP growth target of 5.5 per cent — its lowest in decades.
The real cost is likely to be even higher, said Alicia García Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific. She noted that the estimate did not include the impact of worsening market sentiment reverberating across the housing sector and falling investment in the world’s second-biggest economy.Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles.
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“Let’s assume all Chinese people have Pfizer, three doses . . . there are still going to be a lot of people infected, and a 0.3, 0.4 per cent death rate. Those numbers are still going to be unacceptable for the Chinese leadership.” Additional reporting by Gloria Li, Eleanor Olcott and William Langley in Hong Kong and Maiqi Ding in Beijing.