![]() Importantly, the two outbreaks were contained within the provincial borders, preventing a need for strict measures across multiple regions. ![]() The mean SI then stayed relatively stable from August to October, despite two more Delta outbreaks in Yunnan and Fujian Province. Since then, the country’s top scientific advisors had warned provincial officials regarding the higher infectivity of the Delta variant provincial governments responded strongly when the risks from a new variant first materialised. The centrality of Nanjing in China’s transport network further led the transmission chain to spread across twelve provinces. Several factors may have contributed to the policy escalation: the first inter-provincial transmission of Delta variant in mainland China was identified during the Nanjing outbreak in late July at the height of the summer travel season. Observing the change over time, the mean SI experienced a rather steep increase from late July into August. Meanwhile, the mean population-weighted SI across provinces has remained toward a medium-level (bright green line in Figure 2, 40≤SI≤60). To contextualise this finding, during its third lockdown (January to March 2021), UK’s policy SI was above 80. This line shows the situation of the province with the most stringent policy level among 31 provincial-level jurisdictions in mainland China. Figure 2 shows that the maximum SI (dark green line) in any province has remained 60 or above throughout the last year. The OxCGRT Stringency Index (SI) records the strictness of closure and containment policies, which reduce contacts between people. (*) We define the severe provincial outbreak as a provincial outbreak with more than 20 daily new confirmed cases. Number of provinces with outbreaks connecting to source cities Source cities of severe provincial outbreaks Number of severe provincial outbreaks (*)Īverage duration of severe provincial outbreaks Table 1: Five major COVID-19 outbreaks in 2021 Top officials from the national health authority warned that China faced a hefty challenge in controlling the virus during the 2021-2022 winter-spring season. Most Delta or Omicron-driven transmission clusters have spread to multiple provinces (Wave 2-5). With some baseline prevention and control measures, costly policy options, such as stay-at-home orders, are no more common at the start of 2022 than they were at the start of 2021.įigure 1 and Table 1 together show that China was hit by five relatively large waves of COVID-19 outbreaks since the beginning of 2021. Restrictive policies have been increasingly geographically-targeted. Although the case of Xi’an is quite salient, the average time needed to bring a new provincial outbreak to zero has gotten shorter, not longer, even during the Delta and Omicron waves. We find that Chinese provincial governments have proven to be able to implement the so-called " dynamic clearance" strategy consistently over time. Based on the Blavatnik School’s Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) at the Chinese subnational level, a dataset recording daily government responses to COVID-19 in 31 provincial-level jurisdictions in mainland China since 1 January 2020, we unpack the regional policy variation between provinces and over time. However, comparative data tell a more nuanced story. Many anticipate the COVID-eliminating strategy to be " not sustainable", " getting bumps", " under strain", or " put to its toughest test". The media have paid particular attention to Xi’an, an ancient capital city in North-Western China, where transmission of the Delta-variant led to the city-wide lockdown for a month – the largest lockdown across the country in 2021. The Delta and Omicron waves in China are larger in scale, measured by the number of provinces affected (see Table 1), compared with the few local flare-ups during the year before. Can it continue? This article summarises arguments made in a new working paper. However, it seems that China has become nearly the only country trying to keep up a COVID-eliminating strategy. China saw four waves of COVID-transmission in 2021, with a fifth Omicron wave emerging into the beginning of 2022.ĭata from the Blavatnik School of Government’s Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker suggests that China’s policy has become more targeted over the course of 2021, even in confronting Omicron.īy late 2021, most countries with high vaccination rates have moved toward "living with COVID", including some previous "zero-COVID" holdouts, such as Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, despite the global concerns about the Delta and Omicron variants.
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