Mallika Dureja
Beijing China has declared a “decisive victory” over Covid-19, calling it a “miracle” and saying that it has the lowest death rate in the world. However, there are still questions about how many people actually died from the infection, since the virus infected more than 80% of the country’s 1.4 billion people after restrictions were lifted in December.
State media said that China has moved from “victory” over the pandemic to “endemic,” or living with the virus, because of the announcement.
“At a meeting on Thursday, the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) central committee said that China has won a major and decisive victory in preventing and controlling Covid-19 since November 2022,” the official news agency Xinhua quoted the meeting as saying.
President Xi Jinping led the meeting, and the top leaders of the country were there.
The report from Xinhua said, “China has made a miracle in human history by getting through a pandemic as a country with a lot of people.”
The ruling CPC ended the “zero-Covid” policy all of a sudden in December, getting rid of harsh lockdowns, mass tests, and tracing people’s contacts.
The three-pronged approach kept Covid-19 from spreading too much on the mainland, but the policies hurt the economy by slowing growth and lowering consumption, and the lockdowns made people angry.
By 2022, the “zero-Covid” policy was no longer possible because the Omicron variant was so easy to spread.
In November, people in many parts of China protested against the government’s strict anti-Covid policies. This was likely a big reason why the restrictions were lifted, even though it wasn’t mentioned in the official statement claiming “victory” over Covid-19.
The statement also didn’t say how many people had died because of the disease.
Official records show that just over 83,000 Covid-19 people died in China between December 8 and February 9.
Wu Zunyou, the head epidemiologist at China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said on China’s version of Twitter, Weibo, in January that it was unlikely that Covid-19 would make a big comeback in China in the next two or three months because 80% of people have already been infected.
In December, when China was in the middle of its worst Omicron-driven Covid-19 outbreak, the government said it would only count deaths from pneumonia or respiratory failure as part of the official Covid-19 death toll.
The change in definition made people doubt the official number of deaths even more.
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Thursday’s statement glossed over the fact that hospitals were full in December and that hundreds of millions of people have been stuck for weeks in lockdowns that have been in place since 2020.
“…China’s response to Covid-19 has gone smoothly in a short amount of time, with more than 200 million people getting medical care, nearly 800,000 severe cases getting the right care, and the country’s Covid-19 death rate remaining the lowest in the world,” the meeting said.
“After the infection waves in December and January, Chinese society is now back to normal and people have left the pandemic status, which is also what the public expected,” an unnamed expert from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention told the state-run tabloid Global Times.
The expert said, “It also means that we have started a process in which the disease will become a common respiratory infection that won’t get extra attention from the public and that people will take as normal.”
“It’s a sign that the disease is on its way to becoming widespread,” he said.
The meeting called for “continued efforts to strengthen the production and supply of medicines and medical materials, and to work hard to fix shortcomings at the primary level in terms of capacity, medicine supply, equipment, and other areas.”
