China records its first deaths from covid-19 in more than a year

China recorded its first two deaths from covid-19 on Saturday in more than a year, amid an uptick in the pandemic linked to the omicron variant that puts the country's “covid zero” strategy in trouble.

The National Health Commission notified this Saturday the first two deaths since January 26, 2021, both recorded in the northeastern province of Jilin, the one most affected by this wave that has caused the confinement of millions in several cities.

With these two new deaths, the official balance has risen to 4,638 fatalities since China first detected the coronavirus in the central city of Wuhan in December 2019.

In addition, the health authority reported 4,051 new cases on Saturday, down from the 4,365 reported the previous day.

Thanks to a severe “covid zero” strategy, consisting of tight border controls, long quarantines for international arrivals and early lockdowns, China has managed to keep the virus at bay since the end of the first wave.

But the transmissive omicron variant is putting this strategy in trouble. The most populous country in the world has gone from reporting fewer than 100 cases a day three weeks ago, to a minimum of more than 1,000 cases a day in the last week.

These are very low incidents compared to other countries, but not negligible in China, whose communist leadership has made managing the pandemic a matter of paramount importance.

For Beijing, the low rate of contagion and mortality compared to most countries in the world prove the strength of its governance model.

- Covid zero with nuances -

In recent weeks, some official sources have suggested that China will have to start living with covid-19 at some point, as most countries in the world have done.

President Xi Jinping said on Thursday that the country should persist in its covid zero strategy to “slow the spread of the epidemic as quickly as possible,” but also called for “minimizing the impact of the epidemic on economic and social development.”

Thus, if on previous occasions complete confinements were decreed due to any outbreak, local authorities opted for more varied and less drastic strategies.

Some remained faithful to lockdowns, such as Shenzhen (southeast), a large technology center with 17.5 million inhabitants, which, however, made these measures more flexible after Xi's words.

The economic capital of the country Shanghai, on the other hand, decreed online teaching and has deployed a mass test campaign, but has prevented total closure for now.

Following this latest uptick, the authorities released hospital beds and annulled the provision that all those positive for covid should be admitted to a health center.

Jilin province, on the border with North Korea, has built eight temporary hospitals and two quarantine centers to deal with the thousands of cases in the last week.

Beijing is also closely following the situation in the semi-autonomous territory of Hong Kong, where the pandemic has skyrocketed with tens of thousands of daily infections and a high level of mortality due to the low vaccination of the elderly population.

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