China’s manufacturers left to count the cost of zero-Covid exit, but outlook ‘looks brighter’
South China Morning PostDec 23, 2022
On Friday, a report published by Bloomberg suggested that China may have seen nearly 37M people infected with COVID in a single day this week. The report cited minutes from a meeting held on Wednesday by China's National Health Commission.
The report said that it's likely that within the first 20 days of December, 18 percent, or roughly 248M people in the country contracted the virus. On Tuesday, when the 37M were reportedly infected, China officially reported only 3,049 infections for the country.
While businesses and manufacturers originally expected a gradual approach to the PRC easing zero-COVID, the large number of infections and call-outs comes with a silver lining. Plants in the supply chain will no longer shut down or function in a "closed-loop system." Operations are expected to return to normal in three-to-four weeks and owners can more accurately plan for the development, manufacturing, and delivery of products again.
Pres. Xi Jinping's abrupt and ill-advised abandonment of zero-COVID has left the public health system and the people of China scrambling and without help or resources. The country's failure to vaccinate at scale and provide adequate testing and medications has resulted in the collapse of medical infrastructure. With misinformed reporting using inadequate and misleading definitions, the global community will never fully understand the decimation happening within the PRC.