When it comes to COVID-19, China has always made it clear that it was not going to mess around. While most public health experts around the world accept the reality of some infections while working to minimize severe disease, hospitalization, and death, China has adopted a zero-COVID policy that focuses on preventing any infections at all. When cases do crop up, officials clamp down—hard.
As my colleague Charlie Campbell reports, more than 200 million of the country’s 1.4 billion people currently live under some kind of COVID-19 restrictions, with the most severe in Shanghai, where people have largely been confined to their homes since March, often forbidden to leave even to shop for groceries. Food deliveries have not been able to keep up with demand, leading to scarcity and hunger. Officials brook little objection to the stringent measures, declaring a strict policy of jingmo, or silence. “Stop grumbling, in other words,” Charlie writes. During a May 4 meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo, President Xi Jinping vowed to crack down on “all words and deeds that distort, doubt, and deny our epidemic prevention policies.”
But while popular protest can be controlled, economic blowback can’t, and China is paying a high price for its zero-COVID rules. Retail sales across the country are 11% lower year over year; housing sales, which represent one-fifth of GDP, fell 47% over the same one-year period. In 31 major Chinese cities, unemployment is at its highest levels since official public records became available in 2018. At a May 25 emergency meeting of 100,000 party members, Premier Li Keqiang warned that annual GDP growth rate targets of 5.5% were now unattainable.
“Ordinary Chinese people have felt the heavy-handed authoritarianism of the Party in a much more direct and personal way than many people, especially young people, have before,” Astrid Nordin, the Lau Chair of Chinese International Relations at Kings College London, told Charlie.
Worryingly, the rest of the world is feeling it too. As China’s massive manufacturing sector slows down, and in some places comes to a halt altogether, the effects are felt down global supply chains, leading to empty store shelves far from China’s shores. The dynamic has also impacted imports into the country. At the port of Shanghai, waiting times for unloading import containers increased to 12.9 days in May compared to 7.4 days just six weeks earlier.
The zero-COVID policy is not entirely without justification. One study published on May 10 by a team of Chinese and American researchers estimated that relaxing pandemic restrictions in so densely populated a country could lead to 112 million cases of COVID-19 and 1.5 million deaths in just three months. This, however, is partly due to China’s low rate of vaccination—just 38%—in the over-60 population, as well as the government’s refusal to adopt highly effective mRNA vaccines manufactured abroad and depend instead on its less effective home-grown shots. That reality keeps China stuck on the zero-COVID treadmill, with all of the economic consequences it implies.
“The economic crisis owing to draconian measures to control the outbreak really shows the mess, miscoordination, and miscalculations by leadership at the top,” Valerie Tan, an analyst on Chinese elite politics for the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, told Charlie.
More than 529.3 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 12 a.m. E.T. today, and over 6.28 million people have died. On May 30, there were more than 373,000 new cases and more than 1,200 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending, in terms of cases:
And in terms of deaths:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 8 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 84 million coronavirus cases as of 12 a.m. E.T. today. More than 1 million people have died. On May 30, more than 27,000 new cases were reported and 27 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending in terms of cases:
And in terms of deaths:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of May 31, 12 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
The news isn’t all bad in China, as falling COVID-19 rates in Shanghai have led the government to at last begin easing restrictions in the city of 26 million people, reports the Associated Press. At a briefing today, Shanghai’s vice mayor announced that local bus and subway services, as well as rail connections to the rest of the country, will be restored tomorrow. Businesses including shopping malls, supermarkets, and drug stores will open at 75% capacity and schools will reopen partially, with each school administration free to decide whether or not to resume in-person learning. Barriers erected along sidewalks to prevent pedestrian traffic from moving have already begun coming down.
Israel is also easing its COVID-19 restrictions, with national coronavirus czar Salman Zarka announcing yesterday that quarantining at home will no longer be mandatory for people who test positive for the virus, reports the Times of Israel. Isolating for five days after a positive test is still recommended, but, Zarka said, “we will need to tell the public, ‘we trust you.’” The move comes as Israel is exiting a fifth wave of the pandemic, with daily infection rates plummeting from more than 11,000 a day in January to 2,995 yesterday.
Earlier today, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky told CBS News that she stands by Paxlovid, despite the research showing that people who take the COVID-19 drug may see a rebound of symptoms two to eight days after completing the course of treatment. The CDC says Paxlovid reduces the risk of hospitalization and death by up to nearly 90%. The reason for the return of symptoms is not clear, but one small study suggests it is caused by the same virus that led to the original symptoms, not a re-infection.
Africa continues to lag in overall vaccination rates, with only 17.4% of the continent double-vaccinated, compared to 73.5% in the European Union, reports the Financial Times. At the beginning of the pandemic, just four countries on the continent had vaccine-manufacturing capability; now, that number is up to 15. But the shots are going unused, partly because Africans don’t see the need. The continent represents 16.7% of the world’s population but has only 8.3% of overall COVID-19 deaths. The likely reason: Africa also has the world’s youngest population, with a median age of just 19.7, compared to 42.5 in Europe.
New York City saw its population shrink by 300,000 people over the course of the pandemic, reports the nonprofit news platform The City. The decline—from 8.8 million to 8.5 million people—was attributed both to deaths from COVID-19, which claimed 40,000 New Yorkers, and to people moving out of the city to escape the worst of the pandemic in 2020 and early 2021. Manhattan, which represents just 18% of New York City’s overall population, accounted for one-third of the deaths and relocations.
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Today's newsletter was written by Jeffrey Kluger and edited by Angela Haupt.
