Rigorous testing and 20 million vaccinations a day might see Beijing ready to host the Winter Olympics 2022
In March 2020, I wrote that life was returning to normal in China, but that other countries faced a longer wait. I did not imagine that this longer wait would extend until the summer of 2021. Meanwhile, China has returned to and maintained an essentially pre-Covid state – becoming a kind of parallel universe. In the last year, I have hiked in five provinces, organised a week-long in-person meeting in a tropical botanical garden involving scientists from 20 academic institutions, and attended scores of live music and dance events, featuring maskless musicians playing to packed, maskless crowds. GDP in the first quarter of this year grew 18.3%; in the EU, it fell 0.6%.
China has achieved this success due to the effectiveness of its test, trace and isolate measures. There have been numerous outbreaks of Covid-19 since last spring, varying in size from single cases to hundreds, but all of them have been ended swiftly, with modest, generally localised disruption. The key to this success has been the rapidity and rigour of the measures taken to curtail community transmission.
