The country needs to control the virus until it has boosted vaccination rates in elderly people and reinforced the health-care system.
In some parts of China, barricades have been set up around communities with high numbers of COVID-19 cases.All eyes are on China as it attempts to quash its largest COVID-19 outbreaks since the early days of the pandemic. More than 62,000 people across all 31 of its provinces are infected, most of them with the fast-spreading BA.2 Omicron variant.
If cases do drop, the government will probably spend the next year boosting the low vaccination rates in elderly people and establishing primary health-care infrastructure to ease pressure on hospitals, says economist Xi Chen at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies China’s public-health system.
Mainland China faces a similar predicament if the current outbreak is not controlled. China’s overall vaccination rate is higher than 85%. That has been achieved with the introduction of a digital vaccination-passport system — required for entry into many public buildings and workplaces — and a colour-coded ‘health code’ that indicates whether someone poses an infection risk.
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