Front Burner - Virus surges amid China's 'zero-COVID' reversal

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

A little over a month after China was enforcing some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 policies, the country has now removed most of those restrictions. This followed unusually widespread and sustained protests in December. Mass testing and quarantining has ended. On Sunday, China lifted international travel restrictions for the first time in three-years. But while the government’s numbers on COVID-19 cases and deaths remain low or unavailable, accounts from inside the country indicate the virus is spreading faster than ever. Today on Front Burner, Wall Street Journal China bureau chief Jonathan Cheng gives us a look at what’s happening in Beijing after China’s policy reversal.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Our daughter is coming in today because there's no quarantine. That's why she chose this flight for today, because it's the first day when people can just come right off the airplane and go home. On Sunday, passengers flooded in and out of airports in China,

as three years of COVID travel restrictions came to an end, effectively reopening China's borders. Quarantine for travelers was one of the biggest remaining pieces of China's zero-COVID policies, a regime of mass testing and lockdowns that ultimately couldn't stop the spread of Omicron. China announced it was rolling back many of these restrictions in December after widespread protests posed one of the biggest ever threats to President Xi Jinping's control. Unprecedented acts of defiance in cities and university campuses across China.

Anger and frustration boiling over against the government's strict zero COVID lockdowns. But now, President Xi faces a different challenge, a surge in COVID that's stressing both China's hospitals and its crematoriums, while the country expects travelers to make billions of trips for the Lunar New Year holiday. To help me understand this new COVID reality, I'm joined by Canadian journalist Jonathan Cheng. He's the chief of the Wall Street Journal's China Bureau in Beijing. Jonathan, hi. Thanks so much for coming on to FrontBurner. Thanks for having me.

So since you're in Beijing, I'm hoping you can tell us a bit about how it feels to be there right now, right? How often have the people around you seemed to be getting sick? Basically, it feels like I'm the last man standing. I actually am very hard-pressed to think of any people I know in my circles who haven't gotten it in the last couple weeks. You know, China, of course, was sort of the last country to really wave the white flag and say, look, we can't stop this thing. It's just, it spreads too easily. And so, you know, it happened so quickly, and it happened so abruptly, and nobody quite could believe it when it happened, because it's been three years of these zero COVID measures. There was some variation, quickly and it happened so abruptly and nobody quite could believe it when it happened because

it's been three years of these zero COVID measures. There was some variation. Things would slightly get tighter at some points and slightly get looser at other points. But there was a point where people just almost kind of thought maybe these will never go away. And then boom, all of a sudden they all disappeared and then everyone got sick. And again, I don't know why I managed to be spared. I was going to emergency rooms. I was going to all the places you really shouldn't go if you're trying to avoid getting it. And well, I'm still good. Well, I'll keep my fingers crossed for you.

Can you take me through the restrictions then versus now? So we talked at the beginning of December on the show about President Xi Jinping and how unusually widespread protests were challenging the zero COVID policies. And then shortly after that, China announced it was rolling back a majority of the restrictions. So how different are the COVID restrictions there now versus what they were, say, two months ago? Well, it's night and day. I mean, now there aren't many restrictions to speak of at all. Basically, up to two months ago, everyone in China, you just really got used to it. You had your smartphone. If you were going to walk into anything, if you were going to walk into your own apartment at home, if you were going to get into the subway, if you're going to step into a McDonald's,

if you were going to get on the bus, if you're going to do this or that, you pull out your phone, you scan the QR code, and the QR code there sort of registers your, you've checked in effectively there. So this McDonald's is still open, but for takeaway only. But even to get takeaway, you've got to prove that you're clear of COVID. And here's how I do it. I open up the health app on my smartphone. I scan the QR code. app on my smartphone. I scan the QR code. So it says I've got a green code and I've got a recent COVID test. So I'm good to go. So once there was a positive case, they can go back and track it. Of course, this was, again, not just a China thing, but I don't know that anyone took it quite as far as China did. There were very China-specific elements to this policy too. And I was a victim of this, you could say, because if somebody who lived in your apartment compound,

we're talking like I live in an apartment compound with, I don't know, maybe 25 towers, each, I don't know, 15, 20 stories tall. If one person got sick, your tower for sure was going to be locked down. And we got locked down when someone two buildings over in our compound got a positive case. And this was not long ago. I'm talking October, November, something like that. And what that meant was for three days, I couldn't leave the apartment. And how did I find out? I found out because I woke up. I went downstairs to take the dog out for a walk.

And there was a guy in a hazmat suit standing at the front door of our apartment building, chaining it up, literally chaining it up. And by the end of the day, they had stuck these sensors to everyone's door so that if you opened your front door of your own home, someone would know. And so that was the sort of regime we're living in. And obviously, if you flew in from outside of China, or if you came into Beijing from another city, you are most guaranteed to be quarantined. The only question was really whether you're

going to be put in a centralized quarantine, like some massive auditorium that they've converted into like a massive quarantine facility. I normally hear people sneezing and coughing. And I don't know anyone who has a high fever, but I might be wrong because this place is huge and maybe I just do not see anyone here with a high fever. There's no official information about any plans, any arrangements. We don't know when we're going to leave

and we also have no idea how many tests we need to leave this place. Or whether you'd be allowed to quarantine at home or whether you'd be sent to a hotel quarantine or this or that. So, you know, it really did dictate a lot of how people live their lives. People wouldn't travel more than they needed to

because there was always a risk that you would cross paths with someone and that would mess you up for at least three days, if not a week, if not two weeks. Yeah, it doesn't matter how many times I hear those stories about people locked in their apartment buildings with the sensors on their doors. It's truly incredible to hear.

So both before and after these restrictions lifted, let's talk about how bad the COVID numbers have gotten, at least officially from the government. What has the government reported about the number of cases just went through the roof, they struggled to keep up. The other thing that they finally started to do, and I know this has been happening outside of China, but people testing at home using antigen kits. Every test that I had had here in China was basically, you have to go outside and line up at a booth where someone in a hazmat suit does the PCR test for you, throat. And then it's all linked to your health code, the app on your phone that you use. So once you have antigen self-testing at home, then it's impossible for the government to

know who's positive and who's not because many people are tested positive and then they're not stepping outside their homes. And, you know, as much as the Chinese government knows about its people, even that can be perhaps more than they're capable of, at least on a daily basis. So at first, they stopped reporting these asymptomatic cases. And then after that, they just said, we're not going to report daily case counts at all, because the numbers were dropping. But that was only because they were doing less of this public PCR testing. So actually, in a sense, that lack of transparency, I guess, was not a bad thing in that the transparency they were giving everyone knew, including the government, that this was not very helpful. But when it comes to deaths,

I think that's where things get a little bit more politically sensitive. Having a lot of people get sick is fine in a certain sense, especially if you've dropped restrictions. That's just to be expected. But the number of deaths is absurd. I mean, they've officially recorded, I think maybe we're around two dozen deaths now since the restrictions were lifted about a month ago. And I mean, nobody really believes those numbers, but that's because China came out and said very clearly, we're not going to define a COVID death as a death with COVID. You know, there's a difference between dying with COVID and dying of COVID. They basically said, we're only going to do that if they die of COVID.

And that basically means they had no other underlying conditions. There was no other thing you could point to other than COVID. no other underlying conditions. There was no other thing you could point to other than COVID. And that's how you get to something like a couple dozen deaths in a month from COVID when everyone knows at least a handful of people who have had relatives die, at least with COVID. Tell me about the crematorium you were at. What happened there? Yeah, so a colleague and I, we went out to this crematorium. It's on the east side of Beijing. And it was one of several that have been designated by the city and by the health authorities for cases that are either positive or suspected to be positive. So yeah, there was a lot

of hearses pulling up there. And the people we spoke to there basically said they hadn't seen it this busy before. Usually, they're able to cremate most of the bodies within the morning. And by midday, they're usually done. But long after the sun had set, they were saying, it's just been going nonstop. We're going. We're waking up early. We're starting. And we're going deep into the night.

And you ask, well, are these COVID cases? And actually, many of them don't know. And you ask, well, are these COVID cases? And actually, many of them don't know. But given that it's one of the designated places to send a body, then again, it's anecdotal. And unless you sat there for days and days and sort of counted and compared it, and even then, it's hard to extrapolate from that one place, whether or not it's representative or whether it's busier than other ones in different parts of the country. It's really hard to know. We talked before about how one of the reasons why COVID is spreading so rapidly is because the country has somewhat weaker vaccine coverage than other countries, both because certain age groups don't have as much vaccine uptake and because

the vaccines that China has been using aren't as effective. And I wonder, why is China still using a less protective vaccine here? You know, it's a good question. And it's one of the big mysteries that people are trying to figure out here. One thing that people have suggested is that it's just nationalism, that they don't want to be reliant on a foreign mRNA vaccine, especially one that comes from the Americans, right? Because that's, you know, the big rival. But I don't know if that logic totally holds up because Paxlovid made by Pfizer is one of the go-to medicines here that you take if you get COVID. And there wasn't any hesitation by the authorities to approve that drug. So I'm not

totally sure that that's the explanation. It could be more sort of the other way around. I don't know that they really wanted their own vaccine to sort of be the champion, but you're right. What little clinical data we have does suggest that it's less effective. I think one thing that's particularly strange is just that many people in China were really given the squeeze to get the vaccine, I don't know, in late 2020 or early 2021, right, when many of these other vaccines started to come online. But most people in China have not had a vaccine or a booster in more than a year or at least six months. And so our protection levels were all pretty low. And there's almost no campaign or effort here that I can tell of to get people really vaccinated in

any serious way, not like in early 2021. I remember that. And people came and knocked on my door and said, you should get vaccinated, you know, and nothing like that. Now, maybe it's because I've already gotten vaccinated or something. But again, my third boost was at least a year ago here. So I don't understand what's going on with that. You're due, you're due for sure. And speaking of, I don't know if you've been following the news here, but we've been talking a lot about this new variant, right, XBB15, which is said to be the most transmissible yet. Cases of the Kraken subvariant, a cousin of Omicron,

have been detected in BC, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. Health experts say while it is the most infectious strain discovered so far, there is no indication it causes more severe illness. It's already pretty dominant in the US, but in China, is that the strand that we're mainly seeing spreading? Like what kind of COVID or which variants are dominant there right now? There may be some, but I know that the WHO just last week had gone through some of the data that had been submitted from China. Now, of course, keep in mind that the WHO has asked for more and better data from China, but based on what they've been getting, it's not the XBB, at least so far. The dominant ones are this BA52 and B-7. So, you know, those are ones that have already

been circulating outside of the country. So, you know, China's take on things is that they're being demonized here. You know, they're not exporting the virus. Yes, it's ripping through the country, but they're like the victims, all that stuff of what had been spreading outside. And in fact, the foreign ministry of China saying that it's not China that should be more transparent, it's the US that needs to be more transparent about its COVID situation because XBB is spreading in the US and it's a threat to us here in China. So you kind of have this diplomatic back and forth between- Yeah. And then talking about China being demonized last week, Canada

imposed testing requirements for travelers coming from China. For 30 days, all air travelers aged two and up arriving from China, Hong Kong or Macau will need to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test taken no more than two days before flying. Despite a number of disease experts saying that it won't really slow the virus down, they say it's too late. Society is pretty open these days. And so, you know, the average person's risk isn't necessarily going to be from that person that comes off a plane. It's going to be in that gathering, that restaurant. You really can't play a whack-a-mole game trying to identify particular countries when, you know, in reality, if it is more virulent, if it is more transmissible, it will be here one way or another. And they follow the United States, lots of other countries too, Europe, many countries in Europe, Japan, Morocco, etc.

China believes these rules target its citizens unfairly. COVID response measures need to be science-based and proportionate that treat people of all countries equally, says this spokesperson. Jonathan, talking about all of this, it feels very deja vu, right? Because on top of everything we've been talking about, there's also this big holiday coming up in China, the Lunar New Year on January 22nd. It feels like this is the same conversation we were having at the very beginning of the pandemic. And what could that mean for the spread of the virus this year in the country? Definitely. This is, you know, it's usually described as the world's

largest annual internal migration, and it almost certainly fits that bill. But, you know, a lot of people for the last couple of years haven't been able to go back home for the holiday. And there are a lot of migrant workers in China who spend 51 weeks of the year away from home, usually on the other side of the country doing this job or that job. And this is their one time a year to come back. And so the last couple of years, because we've had the virus kind of having little searches usually around this time, authorities over the last couple of years have been discouraging people from going home for the Lunar New Year. And so some people, it's possible, have not seen their family in three years,

four years, even though they're in the same country. And so I think many people this year are going to say, you know what? I don't care about COVID. I got to go see my family now that I can. And now that in the past, you may not even have been able to do it even if you wanted to because the train station or your QR code or something would have landed you in a quarantine facility instead of being at home. So now they're going to try to do it. And, you know, many of these home villages are deep in the countryside where medical care is going to be a lot poorer than in the big cities. The doctors and nurses may not be as well equipped or as familiar with COVID. So on the other side of things, it does seem that COVID has spread so quickly and so far and so fast that it probably already is in the villages. So there may not be that much to spread still. And if I can make just one other point here too, I mean,

again, I'm not an epidemiologist, but I have seen the argument out there that says because China prior to December was basically like virgin territory in a certain sense. Nobody had had any COVID for three years, like ever. I mean, outside of a couple of people in Wuhan at the beginning and Shanghai and a couple of these localized outbreaks, very few people percentage-wise that had it in China. So when you have this Omicron highly transmissible variant sort of just spreading like wildfire across China, it actually doesn't need to evolve very much. It can just kind of spread unopposed. And therefore, it makes the argument that the virus doesn't need to evolve in order to continue to, you know, evade people's defenses. And therefore, it's not actually a huge risk to the rest of the world because, yes, it'll

get everyone in China sick, but it won't necessarily evolve. But that's one argument I've heard. And again, it's not me speaking as an epidemiologist. Yeah, it's an interesting one, though. I hadn't heard that. of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

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to this podcast, just search for Money for Couups. Of course, of course, health concerns are the most important here. But supply chain interruptions with China have been a factor in inflation around the world for the last few years. With China opening up but COVID surging, could we expect this to help or hurt the global economy? Yeah, no, it's a good question. And I'm at the Wall Street Journal, so we do think about these things a lot. I figured since I've got you here, I got to ask you one of those. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think that people are actually pretty sanguine about the outlook right now. And the reason actually is more that people in the West have kind of bought everything they need to buy. I mean, obviously, that's not literally true, but the demand has started to come down.

I mean, obviously, that's not literally true, but the demand has started to come down. And because supply chains have been relatively normal for, you know, a couple of months, people basically have what they need now and that there's not an explosion in demand. So, you know, the Christmas season is over. So there's less strain on the factories. And many of the factory owners we've spoken to are actually saying the problem is not can we get workers to our factories to fulfill all these orders. It's that we don't actually have that many orders right now because a lot of our customers are sitting on inventory. They're not ordering more stuff from us. So that's one thing. good, I guess, in that sense, in that customers like your Walmarts or your Home Depots or your whatever back in Canada and the US already are sitting on a ton of stuff in their warehouse, so they don't need to buy more, so we'll make more orders to China. And the other thing actually is

that because of Omicron and how we know it works, it's not Delta, it's not like the original COVID. If you're younger and healthier and you don't have underlying conditions, it knocks you out for, I don't know, four days, five days, six days, seven days. But after that, you're okay again. So the people that we are seeing in the hospitals, and again, when I go and walk through these ERs, it's a lot of suffering, but it is mostly people who are not actively part of the economy or they're retired. They're definitely on the older side. And I don't want to minimize the suffering in any way. But if we're talking about the economy, they're not really members of the economy in that way.

So what we saw was, roughly speaking, from north to south in China, we saw factories and restaurants and everyone else was just they were struggling to keep their workers working because everyone was sick and almost all at the same time. But then fast forward like seven or eight, nine, 10 days and everyone's back to work again. So there are many things to worry about. I actually think this one is probably for the time being knock on wood, not one of them. And lastly, let's just talk a little bit about the politics. So I want to return to this idea we covered in December that President Xi made zero tolerance of COVID a point of pride, right? A signature policy. You mentioned that before. And that these protests were a real threat. And now that China has pulled the restrictions

and the virus has become such a problem, how is that playing for Xi? Like, can he convince the public that both the lockdowns and their rollback were the right decision? Well, they're certainly trying. And I think how people look upon it will be determined by a few things.

One is how this all ends. You know, there is an optimistic case here, if you're Xi Jinping, that, you know, many of these cases are not going to kill people. They're going to, as I say, knock people out for a couple days. They get back up, and everyone's actually pretty happy. They can now go travel.

They can travel within the country. They can travel outside the country. They can go home for Lunar New Year. They can go to their favorite restaurants again. They can go to the movies. They don't need to country. They can go home for Lunar New Year. They can go to their favorite restaurants again. They can go to the movies. They don't need to scan that QR code anymore. And it gives them some immunity. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So there are a lot of upsides here. And if the economy comes roaring back, people are going to feel good again. So that's the optimistic case. The other factor here is if your own personal family was touched by this. I mean, it's great to be able to go out again. I mean, if you own a business, it's great to have customers walking in again. But if you lost your mother or you lost your uncle or something like that, then you may have a very different view on things.

Now, because China isn't the kind of a society that allows for mass, you know, sort of reporting of these cases, you're not going to see images from the ERs splashed all over the evening news or on the newspaper. People can share about it on social media as long as they're not criticizing the government for it. And people will talk about it, about, oh, so-and-so's mother died, or oh, so-and-so's father died. But in terms of trying to get this sense of mass waves happening across China, Chinese media is not going to touch it. And so there is this possibility that the suffering doesn't spill out into the public sphere as much, and it's more internalized and privatized

within people's families. And, you know, there were a lot of people who looked at Wuhan 2020 and said, well, this is going to be a real challenge. This could be a crisis point for the party. And no doubt it was a crisis point for the Communist Party. I mean, nobody knew what this virus was and what it would do. But I think within, I don't know, even six months of Wuhan, China starts to look pretty good compared to the rest of the world, as you saw Italy or Brazil or the US or other countries just really get totally crushed by the virus. And the narrative isn't finished yet on COVID either. Who knows, maybe this XBB becomes something else or who knows, but it all kind of depends on how

things end. And there is a path for Xi Jinping and for the Communist Party to come out of this looking okay. That's what I would say. And you can see that messaging already. I mean, Xi Jinping in his New Year's Eve address to the nation, he acknowledged some of this pain. He said, look, none of us have had it easy. He said, look, the light at the end of the tunnel. We'll get there. easy. He said, look, the light at the end of the tunnel, we'll get there. You've had state media sort of say, we need to look at the performance of the country over three years with respect to COVID. You can't just look at this one little patch here on the exit where, okay, maybe things didn't go totally perfectly, but judge us by everything that's happened since the beginning of 2020, and then tell us how you think we did. And I think the Communist Party feels like if you sort of grade them on that curve, that they come out looking better. Okay. Jonathan, thank you. Thank you so much for this.

Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.