“My feeling now is that everyone is afraid of testing positive, and those who are shy don’t dare go out,” she said. Easing the country’s Covid rules is a good first step, but the government needs to do more to support ordinary people and small businesses, Ms Zheng said, adding that “nothing is certain at the moment”.
Ting Lu, chief China economist of Nomura, a Japanese brokerage firm, said he was not “too optimistic” about a sharp recovery in China’s economy, as he expects continued disruptions due to an overwhelmed healthcare system and wave of infections . He added that he expected pent-up demand in the economy to be “relatively weak” next year after three years of lockdowns drained the finances of many Chinese households.
Part of the uncertainty about how China will emerge from “zero Covid” is that no country of this size has turned around so quickly, so drastically – shifted from a full-blown Covid attack to learning to live seemingly overnight with the virus. Longstanding rules change day by day.
As of last week, asymptomatic or mild cases no longer required a hospital stay. All restrictions on buying flu and pain relief medication were also lifted, sparking a run on fever pills and even some traditional Chinese medicines. On Tuesday, China also disabled a travel tracking app, one of several smartphone apps the government used to monitor the whereabouts of Chinese citizens to assess their Covid risk.
Two months ago, before crowds took to the streets to protest the government’s draconian Covid policies, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, said Covid posed such a serious public health risk that fighting the virus would require a “total war” requirement.
“It’s amazing how in two weeks the entire control system has evaporated,” said Mr. Wuttke. “What does this do to business? I don’t know.”
Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said when Australia and New Zealand gave up their zero-Covid ambitions last year, they were able to do so somewhat successfully because they had “implemented effective vaccination programs with effective vaccines. ”
