The reasons why China is confined
The coronavirus is whipping China after two years, when the pandemic broke out in the city of Wuhan. Since then, this Asian country has been able to stop the waves of infections that were emerging in the rest of the world thanks to its “Covid zero” policy. However, the arrival of the variant Omicron is testing this strategy virus containment.
For about a month now, China has been mired in a large number of infections coming from the Omicron variant that is causing it to beat its own records obtained at the beginning of the pandemic. The cases have multiplied throughout the country, which has led the Government to resume multi-city lockdown. In addition to the 25 million people who live in Shanghaione of the cities most affected by these outbreaks, tens of millions have also been confined in other cities.
This situation puts Doubts the effectiveness of the “Covid zero” policy before Ómicron, a more contagious variant and that, in many cases, is presented asymptomatically. The lack of herd immunity in the Chinese population is also an important factor to understand the reason for these data. The percentage of people over 60 years of age with the complete vaccination schedule is much lower than that of the West. According to data from the National Health Commission56% of those over 60 years of age have all three doses, but the figure drops to 48% if we talk about those over 70, and reaches 20% in octogenarians.
This means that more than 50 million people over the age of 60 do not have the complete guidelines, and at least 15 million are in their eighties, which puts the Chinese authorities at risk to prevent a massacre of the dead as is happening in Hong Kong since the beginning of the year.
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