GENEVA, Switzerland — China’s flagship
zero-
COVID strategy to defeat the pandemic is unsustainable, the World Health
Organization said Tuesday, adding that it had told Beijing so and called for a
policy shift.
اضافة اعلان
China has imposed draconian measures, trapping most
of
Shanghai’s 25 million people at home for weeks as the country combats its
worst outbreak since the pandemic began.
The Shanghai lockdown has caused outrage and rare
protests in the last major economy still glued to a zero-COVID policy, while
movement in the capital Beijing has been slowly restricted.
“When we talk
about the zero-COVID strategy, we don’t think that it’s sustainable,
considering the behavior of the virus now and what we anticipate in the
future,”
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference.
“We have discussed about this issue with Chinese
experts and we indicated that the approach will not be sustainable.
“Transiting into another strategy will be very
important.”
When we talk about the zero-COVID strategy, we don’t think that it’s sustainable, considering the behavior of the virus now and what we anticipate in the future.
There is a pressing political dynamic to China’s
virus response, with President Xi Jinping pegging the legitimacy of his
leadership on protecting
Chinese lives from COVID-19.
Xi has doubled down on the zero-COVID approach,
despite mounting public frustration.
Rights, society, and economy
Shanghai is China’s economic
dynamo and its biggest city. The zero-COVID policy has winded an economy which
just months ago had been bouncing back from the pandemic.
“We need to balance the control measures against the
impact they have on society, the impact they have on the economy, and that’s
not always an easy calibration,” said WHO emergencies director
Michael Ryan.
He said any measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic
should show “due respect to individual and human rights”.
Calling for “dynamic, adjustable and agile
policies”, Ryan said early responses to the crisis in many countries showed
that a lack of adaptability “resulted in a lot of harm”.
He reflected on how the world’s most populous nation
had had relatively very few deaths officially ascribed to COVID, and therefore
had “something to protect”.
Given the rapid rise in deaths since February-March,
“any government in that situation will take action to try and combat that”, he
told reporters.
Tedros has been discussing adjusting according to
the circumstances to find an exit strategy, “in depth and in detail with
Chinese colleagues”, Ryan said.
Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on
COVID-19, said that worldwide, it was impossible to stop all transmission of
the virus.
“Our goal, at a global level, is not to find all
cases and stop all transmissions. It’s really not possible at this present
time,” she said.
“But what we need to do is drive transmission down because
the virus is circulating at such an intense level.”
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