How does China reopen its borders without losing its grip on Covid-19?

Beijing’s strict containment measures have been successful in keeping infections down but it can’t hide itself from the rest of the world forever
But opening up won’t be easy if China’s vaccination programme continues to lag behind those of other nations

Josephine Ma

Published: 8:37pm, 2 Mar 2021

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China is facing a dilemma: how to reopen its borders to foreign visitors – as some other nations are considering doing – while stepping up its vaccination programme and relaxing the containment measures it introduced to prevent a resurgence of Covid-19.

More than a year has passed since Beijing closed its borders and locked down Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus was first identified. Since then, its programme of mass screening, lockdowns, quarantine and contact tracing has been hailed a success by the government, and despite sporadic outbreaks, the number of infections has dropped significantly.

While most of the restrictions on domestic travel have been lifted, anyone looking to visit China from abroad still has to go through a strict process of gaining a visa, being tested for Covid-19 and serving a period in quarantine.

Meanwhile, despite some Western nations mulling over the possibility of allowing foreign visitors to enter as their vaccination programmes gather pace, such freedoms are unlikely to be available in China any time soon.

Speaking at an online seminar on Monday, Zhong Nanshan, the country’s top expert on respiratory diseases, said that as of late February just 3.56 vaccination shots per 100 people had been administered in China, compared to more than 90 in Israel and over 20 in the United States.

Beijing had now set a target to boost the ratio to 40 jabs per 100 people by the end of June, he said.

While it is not compulsory for people in China to get a jab, the government set local branches of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) a target to vaccinate 50 million people by mid-February, though it has been reported that deadline was later extended.

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Despite the slow roll-out of the vaccination programme, Zhong and CDC director Gao Fu said that the country would at some point have to move towards mitigation rather than containment.

With the exception of the Pfizer-BioNtech jab, which proved to be 94 per cent effective in a huge study in Israel, it is yet to be seen how effective the other vaccines being used around the world will be in a real-world situation.

More than 114 million people have been infected with the coronavirus and the pathogen continues to mutate. How well vaccines can deal with the variants is also unknown.

Even if China does close the vaccination gap with Western countries, will it lag behind in reopening its borders? It is going to be Beijing’s next challenge.