BEIJING (AP) - A campaign to vaccinate the elderly has sparked hopes China might roll back severe anti-virus controls that prompted protesters to demand President Xi Jinping resign, but the country faces daunting hurdles and up to a year of hard work before "zero COVID" can end.
Stock markets rose after the National Health Commission on Tuesday announced the long-awaited campaign. A low vaccination rate is one of the biggest obstacles to ending curbs that have confined millions of people to their homes, depressed the economy and kept most visitors out of China. Health officials gave no indication how long it might take.
A vaccination campaign will require months and China also needs to build up its hospitals and work out a long-term virus strategy, health experts and economists warn. They say "zero COVID" is likely to stay in place until mid-2023 and possibly as late as 2024.
"China is in no place right now to move away from its 'zero-COVID' policy toward a 'living with COVID' policy," said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist for Capital Economics. "Health care capacity is very weak."
China, where the virus first was detected in late 2019 in the central city of Wuhan, is the last major country trying to stop transmission completely. Others are relaxing controls and trying to live with the virus that has killed at least 6.6 million people worldwide and sickened almost 650 million.
Chinese protesters accuse the ruling Communist Party of failing to outline a path away from restrictions that have repeatedly closed businesses and schools and suspended access to neighborhoods. The curbs have kept case numbers lower than other countries but are seen by the public and scientists as excessive.
Families who have been confined at home for up to four months say they lack reliable access to food and medicine. Others struggle to get treatment for other medical problems. Authorities faced public fury over reports two children who were in quarantine died after their parents said anti-virus controls hampered efforts to get emergency medical care.
The protests, the most widespread show of dissent in decades, erupted Friday after a fire in Urumqi in the northwest killed at least 10 people. That prompted angry questions online about whether firefighters or victims trying to escape were blocked by locked doors or other controls. Authorities denied that, but the deaths became a focus of public anger over the human cost of "zero COVID."
The ruling party has promised to make restrictions less disruptive and eased some controls this week following protests in Shanghai, Beijing and at least six other major cities. But party leaders said they were sticking to "zero COVID" and gave no sign when it might end.
On Wednesday, the Health Commission reported 37,828 new cases in the past 24 hours, including 33,540 without symptoms. The official death toll stands at 5,233 out of 319,536 confirmed cases, compared with 1.1 million deaths in the United States out of almost 100 million infections