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