Speaker 1: China is apparently shutting down the city of sija Jong.
Speaker 1: This is a city of eleven million people not too
Speaker 1: far from Beijing, and Beijing also reported, as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: and med its first COVID related deaths in six months.
Speaker 1: So joining us now to talk about this more. Michelle
Speaker 1: Cortez Bloomberg Medical Science and Tech reporter, Michelle, this is
Speaker 1: a pivotal moment, isn't it. What is trying to get
Speaker 1: to do next? This is exactly what we've all been
Speaker 1: wondering here. What's going to happen. There's no doubt about it.
Speaker 1: China is trying to find its way out of this
Speaker 1: COVID zero malady. And the problem is that when you
Speaker 1: start opening up, you're going to start seeing more cases
Speaker 1: and more deaths. So they really are going to have
Speaker 1: to make a decision between whether or not they want
Speaker 1: to open up and accept a little bit more COVID
Speaker 1: in the country, or whether they want to really try
Speaker 1: to protect everybody. This is the first stuff that we've
Speaker 1: we've seen, as you said, since May, there's three of them,
Speaker 1: all in Beijing, but tens of thousands of cases every day.
Speaker 1: We know these deaths numbers are going to increase The
Speaker 1: question is is what is the response going to be
Speaker 1: from the government. So the gentleman the past over the weekend,
Speaker 1: I believe on on Saturday was eighty seven years old.
Speaker 1: Do we have to begin to delineate or at least
Speaker 1: separate in terms of age here, I mean the elderly population.
Speaker 1: Is we know I mean from the pandemic that we've
Speaker 1: been going through for the last nearly three years now,
Speaker 1: that older folks are much much more at risk. Yeah, well, absolutely,
Speaker 1: we do know that that's the elderly folks that are
Speaker 1: more at risk, also those who are under vaccinated or unvaccinated,
Speaker 1: which a lot of elderly in China are under an unvaccinated.
Speaker 1: The thing is is that China has not made this
Speaker 1: distinction that that you're making right, that the idea that
Speaker 1: you know, people do die if these folks are are elderly,
Speaker 1: they have multiple other conditions. How hard should the country work,
Speaker 1: how much pain should everyone else suffer to make sure
Speaker 1: somebody who's you know, an octogenarian has a few more weeks, months,
Speaker 1: years of life. And in China they have really committed
Speaker 1: to that. They have said that they're not going to
Speaker 1: back down, that the help of everyone in their number
Speaker 1: one priority, and now that's really being put to the test.
Speaker 1: They were getting a little bit more freedom to each
Speaker 1: individual city to make that decision. That's the thing that
Speaker 1: we're wondering whether or not we're gonna hear something from
Speaker 1: the top that hege we really don't want to put
Speaker 1: anyone at higher risk. What's the status of the vaccination
Speaker 1: rolled out at the moment. We are still really under
Speaker 1: vaccinated in China. I mean, they did use a less
Speaker 1: effective vaccine to begin with, but they did a great
Speaker 1: job getting it out in the beginning. The problem is
Speaker 1: that since the outbreak in Shanghai this spring, the number
Speaker 1: of people getting vaccinated every day, every week, every month
Speaker 1: has been quite low. So we have a you know,
Speaker 1: a few millions, you know, maybe dozens of millions, maybe
Speaker 1: a hundred million people in China who have been vaccinated
Speaker 1: in the last six months, but but more than a
Speaker 1: billion people haven't, thoughten vaccinated in the past six months,
Speaker 1: and that's when the immunity from the vaccine really starts
Speaker 1: to wayne. And of course there's very little virus circulating there,
Speaker 1: so there's no natural immunity, so China is really very
Speaker 1: vulnerable still, you know, we were talking a lot about
Speaker 1: the market's response to this. Michelle, is there a real
Speaker 1: risk here that there is some form of reversion that
Speaker 1: we that we kind of move away from a lot
Speaker 1: of the positivity that had been created after the Party
Speaker 1: Congress and and come to a situation that is much
Speaker 1: more a strict and dire. Well, we are actually seeing
Speaker 1: some reversion already in a Juan, as you guys said
Speaker 1: originally that we as I understand that, but the test
Speaker 1: case starts opening up, and we are seeing them going
Speaker 1: back into a lockdown, asking people to not go out,
Speaker 1: closing schools and whatnot. So yeah, absolutely there's a risk.
Speaker 1: There is all kinds of risk, whether they see these
Speaker 1: massive outbreaks, people flooding into hospitals and you know, stick
Speaker 1: and elderly dying, or whether or not they don't do
Speaker 1: that and they lock everything back down and then folks
Speaker 1: can't be getting out to their jobs and everyone trying
Speaker 1: to go into a closed bot system and a manufacturing facility.
Speaker 1: So you know, whether they can dread this needle, it's
Speaker 1: going to be very, very tough. It'll be interesting to watch. Honestly,
Speaker 1: they haven't really leaned into the science to do it yet.
Speaker 1: So they're taking away some of the messaging and some
Speaker 1: of the vaccination and some of the things that could
Speaker 1: help them do it more easily. But they do still
Speaker 1: have time. You would think three years into this the
Speaker 1: pandemic that they would know better is what they need
Speaker 1: to be doing, But they're still figuring it out, just
Speaker 1: like every single other country in the world did. Of course,
Speaker 1: China has been very proud of its record on protecting
Speaker 1: its own population and frequently launched to put into Western countries,
Speaker 1: and they're comparatively elevated death rates. But what a local
Speaker 1: media saying now, has there been any discernible shift in tone.
Speaker 1: There really hasn't been much of a discernible shift in
Speaker 1: tone from the state media. They have been saying that
Speaker 1: the changes recently were just to I tune and if
Speaker 1: they were going to actually go harder in some of
Speaker 1: the more narrow measures so that they don't have to
Speaker 1: go more broadly. The biggest ship that we're seeing is
Speaker 1: in the social media. So many people are just very
Speaker 1: very angry about the restrictions and of course being shut down,
Speaker 1: the snap lockdown, the keeping your kids home from school.
Speaker 1: A lot of people have been quite upset about that.
Speaker 1: More significantly, we're hearing from some people that they're not
Speaker 1: as afraid of the virus as they were in the beginning.
Speaker 1: That's a real fear, of course, because China has been saying,
Speaker 1: as you say, that they are protecting the country, that
Speaker 1: they have such a better record, which, of course, as
Speaker 1: you say, they do. But people are less afraid of it,
Speaker 1: and they're realizing that it's just because you get it,
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you're going to die, doesn't mean you're gonna
Speaker 1: affect your parents and kill them. And as more people
Speaker 1: realize more accurately what this virus looks like, the easier
Speaker 1: it's going to be for China to get out of it.
Speaker 1: So you're talking about the public reaction. During our production
Speaker 1: meeting today, we were talking about two gentlemen I believe
Speaker 1: I can't called the city on the mainland uh in
Speaker 1: which they were residing, that they were kind of convicted
Speaker 1: for a four four years sentence and and sentenced subsequently
Speaker 1: for for violating COVID policy. I mean, what do we
Speaker 1: know about the degree to which people have been compliant. Well,
Speaker 1: by and large, people have been very very compliant. People
Speaker 1: do stay in their homes, they don't go out you know,
Speaker 1: and as a result, anytime there is some kind of
Speaker 1: a big outpouring of reaction and we tend to write
Speaker 1: about it. So we've been doing a lot of those
Speaker 1: stories lately. But honestly, it's it's noteworthy in that there's
Speaker 1: not that many of them, right. You see some people
Speaker 1: occasionally trying to rush out of an idea or scale
Speaker 1: a gate to get out of a lockdown. By and large,
Speaker 1: most of the country is still pretty compliant, but there's
Speaker 1: no doubt about it that they have been very strict
Speaker 1: about staying with the rules. That is an area actually
Speaker 1: where we did see a change from the Standing Committees
Speaker 1: and the Paul Bureau came out about a week or
Speaker 1: two ago now where they changed some of the directions
Speaker 1: and some of the rules that they were going to
Speaker 1: um carry out. And one of the things that they
Speaker 1: did no longer say is that it would be against
Speaker 1: the law to say anything against COVID here. Okay, Michelle
Speaker 1: will leave it there, Thanks so much. Michelle Cortez, Bloomberg's
Speaker 1: medical science and Tech reporter,