For an hour every day, Xu Xinhua waits in line for medical staff to push a swab down his throat and squirm around. Each time, he hopes his Covid test result is negative so he can continue to deliver food, medicine and flowers to people across Shanghai.
Mr. Xu, 49, is paid by Shansong Express, an intercity courier service, by the hour, but only when he fulfills orders. “That means you work hours and hours with no gain,” he said in an interview.
The routine is familiar to hundreds of millions of people as China makes laboratory tests for Covid-19 a regular feature of daily life. In major cities across the country, even where no cases have been reported, residents are still required to present a negative PCR test to go shopping, take the subway or bus, or participate in public activities.
China is the last country in the world trying to eliminate Covid, and the spread of the highly contagious variant of Omicron is challenging the country’s strategy of mass containment and quarantine. The country has used health code apps to survey its citizens and track infections, while imposing strict lockdown measures and centralized quarantine on confirmed cases. receiving and close contacts.
Officials hope regular mass testing will help isolate cases in the community before they erupt into larger outbreaks. However, this policy can be expensive and time consuming, limiting the central government’s efforts to boost the economy.
In Shanghai, just two weeks after the city remove its two-month lock, authorities have placed millions of people under new sanctions to conduct mass testing, sparking protests in some areas. In Beijing, days after the city said it had brought the outbreak under control, cases hit a three-week high on Tuesday. In the eastern Chaoyang district, where the outbreak was linked to a bar, authorities began testing people for three days and closed businesses.
Workers say the time it takes to take the test is cutting their pay. The local government is taking money from poverty reduction projects have to pay for testing. Businesses fear the requirement will hurt productivity, and economists fear people will stay home to avoid distractions.
Some local officials have tried to scale up the test. Others have acknowledged the enormous burden that routine checks have placed on residents. However, China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has ordered the country to “resolutely” follow the strategy of stamping out infectious diseases, and dozens of officials have been fired for mishandling the infectious diseases. During the outbreak, any attempt to relax restrictions carries political risk.
“When you are a local government official and you are faced with these competing demands, you rank them,” said Yanzhong Huang, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “. “I think any sensible local government official would still be more motivated to enthusiastically pursue Zero Covid than to take a more flexible approach.”
After the deputy prime minister, Sun Chunlan, ordered cities to ensure that residents could be tested within a 15-minute walk of where they live, the testing booths were small, with holes for gloved hands. pokes out and picks his throat, appearing in town squares, shopping plazas, and parks.
Follow a report of Soochow Securities, a financial company headquartered in Suzhou.
This approach has sparked public anger in some places. In Shanghai, authorities have forced residential areas or even neighborhoods to close for inspections in recent days, sometimes simply because a resident happened to be in the same store or subway car as who later tested positive.
On Monday night, frustrated residents in the city’s northeastern Yangpu district pounded pots and shouted “Stop locking the doors!” Jaap Grolleman, a Dutch expat living in the vicinity, said after their property was closed over the weekend. More than a dozen police officers stood guard outside a giant wrought-iron gate that had been locked, he said.
Mr. Grolleman, who saw his neighbors protesting. “You don’t know if someone before you or after you’ve tested positive means you’ll be put in quarantine or your entire block will be locked up.”
In Beijing’s Chaoyang district, some residents are arguing for more testing and lockdowns. Zoey Zhou, a journalist who lives in the county, said she worries that if she fails a test, her health code app will prevent her from entering her neighborhood.
“I don’t think it’s acceptable for the government to burden the public and increase surveillance in the name of epidemic prevention and control,” Zhou said. “Why should I be deprived of the freedom I should have?”
There are signs of how China’s pandemic policies are pervasive in the economy. Fewer and fewer people shop, pushing down retail sales. People are less interested in buying properties; Real estate sales in April fell 39% from a year earlier.
Local governments are struggling to pay for all of the testing. In Yangquan, a city in northern China, officials said they would build a mass testing system despite the “severe financial constraints of the city”. In Kaifeng, south, officials said they had raised $3 million for testing “under very difficult financial circumstances.”
Estimates of the total cost of the new testing policy vary, but run into the tens of billions of dollars. According to Japanese bank Nomura, if the test is extended to small cities, which account for up to 70 percent of the population, it could cost up to 1.8 percent of annual economic growth.
Shanghai said that in August it will start charging residents for every test. A single test would cost Mr. Xu, the delivery man, about half what he made in an hour. His income dropped during Shanghai’s two-month shutdown, when he had to live in a hotel that allowed him to come and go.
Parts of the government are sounding the alarm about the need to limit the impact the measures are having. A Beijing health official warned on Thursday that PCR testing “shouldn’t become the norm”. And some cities have relaxed requirements on how often tests must be performed.
In southern Jiangxi province, where civil servants have faced salary cut and tightening bonuses for months because of tight budgets, officials decided last week to stop batch testing in low-prevalence areas, on the grounds that it is an impediment to economic development.
Experts say testing can break a chain of transmission before it erupts into a broader outbreak, but it is not sustainable in the long run. Other measures, such as increasing vaccinations and securing antiviral drugs, can help a country develop broader immunity and better prepare for future outbreaks.
But of China’s 264 million people aged 60 and over, only 64% have improved health, a number experts say is too low. According to an expert recent research.
Some business leaders have pointed to what they see as short-sighted in the government’s approach. During a recent meeting with Li Keqiang, China’s premier and other foreign business leaders, Jörg Wuttke, China’s chief representative for BASF, the German chemical giant, urged the leader. The focus is on vaccinations instead of testing, Mr. Wuttke said. He said he told Mr. Li that not vaccinating the elderly “could hold the economy hostage” was incomprehensible.
Li YouLiu Yi and Joy Dong research contributions.
