For Its Next Zero Covid Chapter, China Turns to Mass Testing
By Alexandra Stevenson, June 14, 2022, NY Times

There are signs of how China’s pandemic policies are rippling through the economy. Fewer people are shopping, pushing retail sales down. People are less interested in buying property; real estate sales in April plunged 39 percent from a year earlier.

Local governments are struggling to pay for all the testing. In Yangquan, a city in northern China, officials said they would build a mass testing system despite the city’s “severe financial restraints.” In Kaifeng, to the south, officials said
they had scraped together $3 million for testing “under very difficult financial circumstances.”

Estimates of the total cost of the new testing policy vary, but are in the tens of billions of dollars. If testing is extended to small cities, capturing as much 70 percent of the population, it could cost as much as 1.8 percent of annual economic growth,
according to the Japanese bank Nomura.

Shanghai has said that in August it will start charging residents for every test. A single test will cost Mr. Xu, the delivery worker, roughly half of what he makes in an hour. His income had already taken a hit during Shanghai’s two-month lockdown,
when he had to live in a hotel that would allow 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 P.C.R. testing “should not become the norm.” And some cities have eased the requirements for
how frequently tests must be taken.

In the southern province of Jiangxi, where civil servants have faced pay cuts and a squeeze on bonuses for months because the budget is so tight, officials decided last week to stop mass testing in areas with low cases, citing it as an obstacle to
economic development.

Testing can break a transmission chain before it escalates into a broader outbreak, experts say, but it is unsustainable in the long term. Other measures, such as increasing vaccinations and securing antiviral drugs, could help a country develop a
broader immunity and be better prepared for future outbreaks.

But of China’s 264 million people who are 60 or older, just 64 percent have received a booster, a figure that experts say is too low. A third dose of China’s main Sinovac vaccine is needed to significantly increase protection against severe disease
and death, according to a recent study.

Some business leaders have pointed out what they see as the shortsightedness of the government’s approach. In 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 to focus on vaccinations instead of testing, Mr. Wuttke said. It was unfathomable, he said he had told Mr. Li, how failing to vaccinate the elderly “can hold the economy hostage.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/business/china-covid-testing.html

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