For an hour every day, Xu Xinhua waited in line for a healthcare professional to put a tampon down his throat and twist it. Each time, he hopes his Covid test will be negative so he can continue to deliver food, medicine and flowers to Shanghai residents.
Mr. Sue, 49, receives an hourly wage from Shansong Express, a long-distance courier service, but only when fulfilling orders. “That means you work for an hour without profit,” Mr. Sue said in an interview.
The routine is known to hundreds of millions of people as China makes laboratory tests for Covid a constant feature of everyday life. In major cities across the country, even when no cases have been reported, residents must pass a negative PCR test to shop, ride the subway or bus, or participate in community activities.
China is the last country in the world to try to eliminate Covid, and the proliferation of the highly contagious version of Omicron is challenging its strategy of mass blockades and quarantines. The country already uses health code applications to monitor its citizens and track infections and imposes strict blockades and centralized quarantines for confirmed cases and close contacts.
Officials hope the regular mass tests will help isolate cases in the community before they escalate into larger outbreaks. But politics can be costly and time-consuming, undermining the central government’s efforts to fuel the economy.
In Shanghai, just two weeks after the city lifted its two-month blockade, authorities put millions under new blockades to conduct mass tests, sparking protests in some areas. In Beijing, days after the city said it had taken control of the outbreak, cases peaked at a three-week high on Tuesday. In the eastern district of Chaoyang, where the outbreak was linked to a bar, authorities began testing residents for three days and closed businesses.
Workers say the time it takes to test reduces their pay. Local authorities take money from poverty reduction projects to pay for tests. Businesses are worried that the demand will hurt productivity, and economists are worried that people will stay home to avoid anxiety.
Some local officials tried to reduce the tests. Others acknowledge the enormous burden that routine testing places on citizens. But China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has ordered the country to “steadfastly” adhere to a strategy to control infections, and dozens of officials have been fired for mishandling fires, making every effort to loosen restrictions politically risky.
“When you are an employee of the local government and you face these competing requirements, you will rank them,” said Yangong Huang, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “I think that any rational local government official will still have more incentive to enthusiastically pursue Zero Covid than to take a more flexible approach.
After Deputy Prime Minister Sun Chunlan ordered cities to ensure that residents could be tested within a 15-minute walk of where they live, small testing booths appeared in shopping malls, with holes for gloved hands to a throat swab also protrudes. squares and parks.
Health officials in 57 cities and five of China’s 31 provinces – covering nearly half of the country’s 1.4 billion people – have launched a normalized testing system, according to a report by Suzhou-based financial firm Soochow Securities.
The approach has fueled public anger in some places. In Shanghai, authorities have forced apartment complexes or even city blocks to be blocked again for testing in recent days, sometimes because only one resident ended up in the same store or subway car as someone who later tested positive.
On Monday night, frustrated residents of the city’s northeastern Yanpu district shook flower pots and shouted, “Stop blocking! Stop blocking!” after their complex was closed over the weekend, said Jaap Groleman, a Dutch immigrant living in the neighborhood. More than a dozen police officers stood guard in front of a giant wrought-iron gate that was locked, he said.
“People are worried about taking the subway or going to the mall,” said Mr Groleman, who saw his neighbors protesting. “You don’t know if someone before or after you tested positive, which means you’ll be quarantined or your whole compound will be blocked.
In Beijing’s Chaoyang district, some residents are shivering from more tests and blockades. Zoe Zhou, a journalist living in the area, said she was worried that if she missed a test, her health code application would prevent her from entering her neighborhood.
“I don’t think it’s acceptable for the government to overburden the public and step up surveillance in the name of preventing the epidemic,” Ms. Zhou said. “Why am I being deprived of the freedom I should have?”
There are signs that China’s pandemic policy is spreading in the economy. Fewer people shop, which reduces retail sales. People are less interested in buying a property; real estate sales fell 39 percent in April from a year earlier.
Local authorities are struggling to pay for all the tests. In Yanquan, a city in northern China, officials said they would build a mass testing system despite “the city’s severe financial constraints.” In Kaifeng, in the south, officials said they had raised $ 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 towns, which cover up to 70% of the population, it could cost up to 1.8% of annual economic growth, according to Japan’s Nomura Bank.
Shanghai said it would start charging residents for each test in August. One test will cost Mr. Sue, the delivery worker, about half what he does in an hour. His income had already been hit during the two-month blockade of Shanghai, when he had to live in a hotel that would allow him to come and go.
Part of the government is concerned about the need to limit the impact of the measures. A health official in Beijing warned on Thursday that PCR testing “should not become the norm.” And some cities have eased the requirements for how often tests should be done.
In the southern province of Jiangxi, where civil servants have been facing pay cuts and bonuses for months because the budget is so limited, officials last week decided to stop mass tests in low-income areas, citing economic barriers. development.
Experts say the test could break the transmission chain before escalating into a wider outbreak, but is unsustainable in the long run. Other measures, such as increasing vaccinations and providing antiviral drugs, could help the country develop broader immunity and be better prepared for future outbreaks.
But of China’s 264 million people aged 60 or older, only 64 percent have received a booster, a figure that experts say is too low. A third dose of the main Chinese Sinovac vaccine is needed to significantly increase protection against serious illness and death, according to a recent study.
Some business leaders have cited what they see as short-sightedness in the government’s approach. In a recent meeting with Li Keqiang, China’s prime minister, and other foreign business leaders, Jorg Wutke, China’s chief spokesman for BASF, the German chemical giant, said he urged the leader to focus on vaccinations instead of tests. It was amazing, Mr Vutke said, that he had told Mr Lee how the lack of vaccination of the elderly “could hold the economy hostage”.
Li Yu, Liu Yi and Joy Dong contributed to the study.
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