Will Omicron justify China’s ‘zero Covid’ policy?

China is returning to lockdown in a bid to prevent an Omicron outbreak after recording the country’s first two cases of the Covid-19 variant.

The first confirmed Omicron case was reported on Monday, in an overseas traveller who arrived in the northern city of Tianjin last week. A man who arrived in Shanghai from overseas in late November was also confirmed to be infected on Tuesday.

The rapid global spread of the new variant poses “a fresh challenge to the government's “zero-Covid” strategy”, which has had “great economic costs, as well as no shortage of disruption to daily life”, said CNN.

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‘Tracing the source’

The unnamed traveller in the Tianjin case was “identified as an asymptomatic carrier on arrival” and was in hotel quarantine when “genome sequencing confirmed he had the Omicron variant – suggesting the variant had not been directly exposed to local residents”, said CNN.

But the infected man in the second confirmed case reportedly travelled between cities within China while carrying the highly infectious strain. After first arriving in Shanghai, he “underwent two weeks of centralised quarantine, during which he repeatedly tested negative”, said the broadcaster.

He then travelled to the southern city of Guangzhou on a flight that Air China sources said was almost full, before testing positive.

Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, told CNN that there are “several possibilities” as to how this man became infected with the new variant. “There have been many instances of infections acquired at quarantine hotels,” said the scientist, who added: “It's very important to find out whether the case in Shanghai was infected outside China or in a local quarantine hotel.”

Fears that the infected traveller may have unwittingly spread Omicron after leaving quarantine have been compounded by a newly published study by University of Hong Kong researchers who found that two doses of the Chinese-developed Sinovac vaccine “do not produce sufficient levels of serum antibodies” against the variant.

After analysing blood samples from 25 people vaccinated with the jab, the team concluded that Omicron “was able to reduce the effectiveness” of two Sinovac doses, leaving recipients “at a higher risk of breakthrough or reinfection”.

“If the results are accurate, they could spell particular trouble for China, where the vaccine is commonly used,” said The New York Times (NYT).

The study is preliminary and “antibody levels do not give a complete picture of a person’s immune response”, the newspaper added. And although “it remains unclear whether the Sinovac vaccine can fend off severe disease or death from Omicron”, a double dose of the jab “most likely offers some protection”.

All the same, the Hong Kong researchers urged Sinovac recipients “to get a third dose of the vaccine as soon as possible while waiting for the next generation of more matched vaccine”.

‘Booster shot’

The arrival of the new variant poses a “horrible dilemma” for the authorities in Beijing, said The Telegraph’s international business editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.

Omicron “is the end of the road for China’s zero-Covid policy”, he argued. China “cannot plausibly suppress a variant that spreads with lightning speed through asymptomatic cases that escape surveillance”, and “even if total suppression could be achieved, the social, economic, and strategic costs of trying to do the near impossible would become prohibitive over time”.

Despite such concerns, said CNN, “Chinese public health experts and state media have previously voiced confidence in the country’s ability to tackle the new variant, citing China’s strict border control measures and its ability to swiftly identify and isolate infected cases and their close contacts”.

As countries across the world “scrambled” to reintroduce restrictions when Omicron first began spreading, “it was business as usual” in China, where “weeding out every last infection” has long been the “priority”, Time magazine reported.

“Countries embracing travel and border restrictions anew raises questions about whether China’s strategy may offer a better defence from newly emerging variants,” the magazine said, “particularly in the early days when their risk isn’t fully understood and the guarantee of an exit from the Covid pandemic is far from certain.”

China’s state-owned newspaper the Global Times was quick to insist that the country had “the strongest line of defence” against the new variant, arguing that “the ‘open door’ policy of the US and Europe not long ago is being tested”.

“China’s dynamic zero-case route has been criticised in the West in many ways,” the paper said. “However, if the Omicron variant launches a new wave of attack, it is China that will be best able to block its invasion.”

Some experts in the West have also pointed to the strengths of the Chinese strategy amid spiralling global Omicron infections.

“Omicron is a booster shot for covid Zero,” Huang Yanzhong, a senior fellow for global health at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, told Time. “If Western countries are walking back on their reopening and closing borders, they’ll lose the grounds for accusing China of sticking to what they say is an unsustainable and incorrect approach.”

Not everybody is convinced though. Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, told The Telegraph that China “can’t keep it out completely” and that “Omicron looks so transmissible that it might evade their controls”.

And even if China’s strict measures do keep the new variant at bay, the economic costs may be too great to bear, according to the paper’s Evans-Pritchard. The “stubborn superpower” is “flirting with recession” after almost two years of near-lockdown, he wrote.

And this economic “assault” threatens to “drain the lifeblood that has sustained China’s growth miracle” in recent decades.