The World Health Organisation (WHO) on Tuesday said that China’s ‘zero-Covid’ strategy to defeat the Covid-19 outbreak is unsustainable, and that it has asked Beijing to initiate a policy shift in order to tackle the surging caseload.
We don’t think that it is sustainable considering the behaviour of the virus,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a media briefing in Geneva late on Tuesday.
The WHO’s statement comes amid belligerent Covid-19 outbreaks in Shanghai, Beijing and other provinces, which China has been attempting to control through lockdowns and mass tests.
Most of Shanghai’s 25 million residents have been locked in at home for weeks and several strict Covid-19 control measures have been implemented across Beijing, including the shutting down of public spaces, banning dine-ins and suspension of scores of subway stations and bus routes.
While Shanghai has logged hundreds of thousands of cases and over 500 deaths since March, Beijing’s caseload – at around 900 – remains low.