China’s Covid Pivot Is a Force Majeure Moment
Beijing has focused on building up quarantine facilities, rather than hospitals. That’s a recipe for disaster.
An abrupt about-face.
Source: Bloomberg
The film Force Majeure features a scene in which customers at an open-air Alpine restaurant witness an avalanche. As snow barrels down the mountain toward them, they watch at first with insouciance, then rising anxiety and finally scatter in panic. Observing the omicron wave build in China feels a bit like this. We can see the approaching onslaught, we know it is coming, but it isn’t quite here yet — and we don’t know for sure how bad the impact will be. Is it a planned explosion, as one of the diners in the movie opines, or are we in the realm of out-of-control events?
The impression is certainly of a chaotic retreat. In early November, the government was still saying it would “unswervingly” follow a Covid-Zero policy that it deemed “completely correct.” Little more than a month later, President Xi Jinping’s signature pandemic program is history, for all practical purposes. The testing system has broken down, and a mobile app used to track people’s travel history has been scrapped. Propaganda has done a 180-degree pivot: After three years of painting the virus as deadly, officials now say it is no worse than the flu. Anecdotally, cases are surging, though official daily infection tallies are down because of the reduction in testing. Hospitals are said to be scrambling to cope.