Is China softening its policy response to COVID-19?
来源:World Economic Forum;发表于:2022-03-31;人气指数:338
Is China
softening its policy response to COVID-19?
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/is-china-softening-response-covid/
Data show that
China’s policy has become less stringent and more targeted during the national
outbreaks of COVID-19 in 2021, and in confronting Omicron at the beginning of
2022.
Image: Renato Marques
for Unsplash
18 Mar 2022
Meng Ke
Associate Professor,
Tsinghua University
Hao Zha
MPP student of School
of Public Policy & Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
*There is a
conventional view that China has pursued a stringent and unsustainable
zero-COVID policy.
*Despite the official
rhetoric that the government will not change its policy stance, it has actually
been adjusting and softening it since 2021.
*This is backed up by
data from Chinese regions, showing an increasingly less stringent and more
targeted response.
Contrary to the
conventional view that China has pursued an invariably stringent (and therefore
unsustainable) zero-COVID policy, evidence from newly available data on
the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) reveals a
rather different picture at a regional level.
Data show that
China’s policy became less stringent and more targeted during the national
outbreaks of COVID in 2021, and again in confronting Omicron at the beginning
of 2022. The OxCGRT Stringency Index (SI) records the strictness of
closure and containment policies, which reduce contacts between people.
Since late October
2021, the average population-weighted SI of Chinese provinces has risen but not
exceeded the level of the previous summer wave. The December-January wave saw a
new challenge from Omicron, but the overall response stringency was less than
that during the first Delta wave in summer 2021.
Figure 1: Comparison
of average population-weighted stringency of provinces in China, updated to 28
February 2022.
Image: Data: OxCGRT
Chinese provinces
with experience coping with the Delta variant implemented significantly
different and less stringent measures in subsequent waves than those lacking
experience, as shown in Figure 2 (below). Focusing on 20 provinces with
domestic cases in the autumn wave, we divided these provinces into two groups
according to whether or not they experienced local outbreaks in the summer.
Figure 2 shows that
Group A and Group B shared close mean peak daily domestic cases, namely 12.5
and 12.9, suggesting that these two groups experienced a similar scale of local
outbreaks in the autumn wave. However, the mean of peak SI was 64.3 in Group A,
while that in Group B was 70.8, meaning that provinces that had experienced an
outbreak in the summer showed less stringent responses in subsequent waves.
Moreover, although
the means of days with new daily domestic cases were the same in the two groups
(around 11 days), the mean of days with SI > 60 was 12.7 in Group A, lower
than that in Group B (16.9 days). These differences indicated that provinces
with local outbreaks in the summer applied comparatively less stringent
policies yet still effectively controlled the spread of the pandemic.
Figure 2: Comparison
of provincial response in the autumn wave. Note: Note: Provinces in Group A
experienced local outbreaks in the summer, including Liaoning, Inner Mongolia,
Henan, Beijing, Sichuan, Ningxia, Chongqing, Shandong, Yunnan, Jiangsu, Hubei,
and Hunan; provinces in Group B did not experience local outbreaks in the
summer, including Heilongjiang, Hebei, Gansu, Shaanxi, Guizhou, Qinghai,
Jiangxi, and Zhejiang.
Image: Data source:
OxCGRT, National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China
The Chinese approach
to confronting COVID is becoming increasingly less stringent because Chinese
authorities learn from experiences accumulated in previous outbreaks. For
example, Henan experienced a severe outbreak in the summer with 41 daily
domestic cases at the peak date, and its SI soared to roughly 74.5. In the
autumn wave, though Henan’s peak daily domestic cases ranked third in Group A,
its SI was only 44.4 on the peak date. This low SI may be a result of the
experience gained by the province in the previous local outbreak.
Zhengzhou, the
capital of Henan province, locked down all communities, closed all
non-essential places, prohibited all kinds of gathering activities, and
suspended public transport operations at the city level after domestic cases were
confirmed during the summer outbreak. However, when confronting the autumn
wave, it only applied the same measures in a specific town with confirmed cases
while allowing people to gather for activities, entertainment venues to open,
and public transport to run in other areas.
This finding sends an
important message about the future of China’s zero-COVID policy. Despite the
official rhetoric that China will not change its policy stance, the country has
actually been adjusting and softening it in a de facto way since 2021. It's true
that some cities re-adopted stringent policies when confronting the Omicron
wave in March, but we predict that China’s regional governments will adopt more
targeted responses after accumulating enough experience tackling Omicron. This
adjustment of regional policy stringency based on experience learning may
present China a defacto plan of exit from its zero-COVID policy in the long
run.
Thomas Hale, Yuxi
Zhang, Hui Zhou, Lijun Wang, Zihan Zhang, Zijia Tan, Longmei Deng contributed
to this article as co-authors of the underlying working paper.