Description
What explains the Chinese government’s response, through an elimination approach, to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic? Initial reactions were dispersed and incremental as local officials wrestled with how loudly to sound the alarms on the emergence of a new respiratory virus that seemed to be spreading. But eventually it became a centralized and coordinated effort that Beijing backed. The ramped up response was effective, if authoritarian and heavy-handed at times. Since then, the scale and speed of the state’s ability to assemble testing, tracing, quarantining, and isolating capacity and other measures have enabled China to quickly enclose inevitable flare-ups so far. This chapter examines how experience with past infectious disease outbreaks and political priorities in a predominantly top-down system shape the public health response to COVID-19 and argues that the same sources drive the evolving course of action over time. It considers obstacles to pursuing a costly “zero-COVID” strategy as variants of the virus spread, the vaccination drive progresses, and the possibility exists that the coronavirus becomes endemic. Containment of the virus, however, remains contingent and fragile, as it does elsewhere.
