As a stubborn strain of Covid-19 spilled into China this year, forcing hundreds of millions of people into lockdown, officials turned to a new tool: regular mass PCR testing. several times a week to isolate cases more quickly and avoid catastrophic lockdowns in the future.
But in recent months, that approach has failed to slow some of China’s biggest outbreaks. The mass inspection program that has become appears to be crumbling. A multi-billion dollar business.
Health workers desperate to isolate the latest outbreak have barricaded buildings and even put one individual under lockdown in public. It has been. In all villages, towns and cities, inspection requirements are becoming more onerous and penalties for non-compliance are tougher.
But as testing agencies get bigger and bigger, the resources to support them face more financial strain, and governments that fund most of the tests are struggling to pay. It shows signs.
A mass-testing strategy in China, which has yet to approve an mRNA vaccine, will start in May with routine testing in cities of over 10 million people, providing testing facilities within a 15-minute walk of anywhere in the city. It started with an order. Overnight, tens of thousands of test booths popped up in cities like Shanghai and Beijing.
Bryce Dye said she is getting tested for coronavirus as often as possible. Her grandmother recently died in hospital, but Ms. Dai was not allowed to see her grandmother because her 48-hour negative PCR test had expired.
“The new coronavirus is not so scary,” said Dai, 30, who lives in Shanghai. Instead, she said, it’s an emotional price that she and others have to pay.
For smaller municipalities, which are under pressure to stimulate an already slowing economy, building large-scale test networks like those seen in Shanghai and Beijing is creating a huge financial burden.
municipalities of Shanxi, etc. When Jiangxi has already Diverted funds from public projects to fund pandemic monitoring and control. Some cities are facing salary cuts for civil servants. Other countries have frozen bonuses for officials to help with testing.
Still, there are signs of funding shortfalls from some of China’s biggest testing firms.
Diane Diagnostics warned of “bad debt risks” this summer, saying outstanding payments had nearly doubled in the past year. Shanghai Runda Medical Technology recently announced that his outstanding bills increased by a quarter over the same period. Guangzhou Kingmed Diagnostics warned that late payments could increase its risk profile.
“There is a serious imbalance between local government revenues and expenditures,” analysts at the Bank of China Institute wrote in a note to clients in late September. They estimate that if every three days he tests 900 million people, regular mass testing would cost nearly $100 billion a year.
Cases continue to rise as these financial pressures mount. Last week, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region official Liu Sushe said that “due to the inefficiency of our control measures, we have not achieved Covid dynamic zero for more than two months,” calling defeat rare. Admitted. ”
Test prep has proven to be less effective, but the industry continues to make huge profits. said Jialin Zhang, head of China healthcare research at Japanese bank Nomura.
For Chinese citizens like Chen Yaya, these wealth have come to symbolize the futility of Beijing’s coronavirus zero policy.
Ms Cheng, a Shanghai resident, said she was quietly protesting the city’s testing requirements by refusing to take swabs more than once a week if necessary. I schedule my schedule to shop for groceries and meet my friends within the next 72 hours. By limiting the number of tests she takes, she hopes to fill her testing company’s pockets and avoid the possibility of getting caught up in a lockdown.
Mr. Cheng said that “reducing the profits of testing companies is only a superficial reason” to avoid testing. She’s mostly concerned that if she tests positive, she’ll be caught in a lockdown or sent to a government isolation facility.
Authorities have taken more punitive measures to force people to obey swabs.in the South, North When east Chinese police have detained people for days, sometimes for a week or more, for skipping PCR tests.
There was a time when China’s ability to find and isolate cases was considered the pinnacle of pandemic strategy. Infections surge in countries around the world, hospitals are at capacity, while China’s Covid numbers remain low, with Chinese consumers keeping the economy strong, officials in Beijing grapple with the virus. I was able to enjoy the success of
But as the true costs of maintaining such programs become more apparent, new near-daily testing regimes aimed at combating stubborn variants face increasing frustration. , for gig workers who are only paid by order, standing in line for testing can mean lost wages.
Testing can reduce the amount of time you need to decompress after work, like Haley Zhao, who is swabbed every 72 hours as required by Beijing authorities. “It’s not like, ‘As long as you do a PCR test, you can do whatever you want,'” said Zhao, 26. Please test it first.
When a conference recently used the tagline “Age of PCR thriving” in its marketing materials, the backlash was so swift that organizers were forced to cancel the event, later to promote PCR testing. clarified that it is not. “Some are rubbing salt into the wounds of those who are suffering,” one commenter wrote online about the meeting.
Even workers who swab their throats and noses and process test results have lost enthusiasm for the country’s testing protocols. Before China mandated mass testing, 153,000 people were employed as inspectors. hundreds of thousands The number of communist volunteers ready to help fight the coronavirus.
However, the work is tiring and the pay is low. A lab technician can earn him as much as $4,250 a month, while swab work advertising can make him closer to $1,000.
“It’s boring, tedious, repetitive, mechanical work,” said Fu Shixing, a university student in the eastern city of Nanjing. Hu said in August he spent two weeks volunteering to help with inspections in the industrial city of Taiyuan as part of the Communist Party’s youth program. Dressed in a sweaty hazmat suit, he scanned his ID card and handed out PCR test tubes.
Other communities and health workers sometimes cut corners and pretended to test people without taking samples. added. “For them, PCR testing is just a job.”
Re You Contributed to research.