China's COVID Response

Huang Yongfu

During the New Year's Eve address to ring in 2023 on Saturday, President Xi Jinping emphasised that "since COVID-19 struck, we have put the people and life first the entire time". He noted that China has entered a new phase of COVID response, where "we have adapted our COVID response in light of the evolving situation to protect the life and health of the people to the greatest extent possible". 

Recently, some Western politicians and media have relentlessly and purposefully blamed China's relaxation of the dynamic zero-COVID policy as "putting the world in peril". Since the start of the pandemic, the Chinese government has effectively mobilised people and resources on an unprecedented scale. China has secured progress with concerted efforts nationwide by succeeding in keeping the virus at bay and deaths to an astonishingly low level compared with many Western countries.

A report by the WHO-China Joint Mission issued on Feb 28, 2020 hailed China's COVID response as the most "ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history" and "deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat".

For much of the past three years, most Chinese have enjoyed a normal, virus-free life and have accumulated effective experience in dealing with and living with the virus. As the virus keeps mutating and the pandemic continues, what the public need is to raise their awareness of protective measures against the virus, further promote vaccination and beat the virus.

China's zero-COVID strategy did come at a huge cost. According to the data on health development in 2021 issued by the National Bureau of Statistics and the National Health Commission, the total health expenditure in 2020 and 2021 reached 14.7 trillion yuan, equivalent to the total amount from 2016 to 2018. Also, in April 2022 the National Health Insurance Bureau revealed that 3.2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been inoculated nationwide, costing more than 120 billion yuan. Chinese government ramped up efforts to develop the government-funded health-insurance scheme.

In 2009, the government unveiled a health reform plan with "universal health coverage" that aimed to provide affordable, basic care for everyone by 2020, with a special focus on rural residents. By 2011, the government-financed health insurance covered more than 95 per cent of China's population in some form. The number of health workers per person had almost doubled (by more than 85 per cent) and the number of hospital beds increased by about one and a half time by 2017. 

Thanks to a big increase in government health spending, the out-of-pocket payments for healthcare have fell from about 60 per cent of households' health spending to 30 per cent, according to a report on "Healthy China" by the WHO, the World Bank and the Chinese government in 2019. Chinese government beefed up efforts to rebuild primary-care facilities or community-level facilities as a gateway to hospitals.

The community health centres or clinics were typically filled with less well-trained doctors and substandard equipment inferior. A national plan for healthcare development had called for community clinics to have 3.5 health workers per 1,000 residents served by 2020. The government latest health-reform plan, published in 2016, spent billions of dollars to build an effective primary-care system. As COVID cases rise, local governments decided to rebuild community clinics. In the city of Beijing 240 of the capital's community health centres had set up fever clinics by the end of November, and the remaining 110 or so had opened them as well in the beginning of December.

-- China.org.cn