China prepares to face down Omicron
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The new variant poses a particular threat to China's hitherto successful zero-Covid strategy at a time when the country's economy is looking vulnerable.
Ed Butler gets the latest on the fast-moving Omicron variant from Boston University epidemiologist Eleanor Murray. One new development is a recent study in Hong Kong that found that one of the two main Chinese vaccines offers very little resistance against it. Health security expert Nicholas Thomas of Hong Kong's City University says the Chinese government is now in a race to deliver booster vaccines to its population, while stopping Omicron from leaching across its porous land borders.
It comes at a sensitive time, with the Beijing Winter Olympics to begin in February, and the government seeking to gently deflate a property market bubble ahead of a politically sensitive Communist Party Congress in October. But independent economist Andy Xie says that when push comes to shove, the government would rather lockdown the entire national economy rather than let Covid get out of control.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: A large crowd of commuters wearing face masks at a subway station in Hong Kong; Credit: Budrul Chukrut/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC coming up with the emergence of |
| 0:07.8 | Omicron, the most infectious COVID variant yet. Is this virus now undefeatable? We've learned to live |
| 0:15.3 | with measles. We've learned to live with chicken pox. We've learned to live with the plague. |
| 0:20.6 | And long term, that's what we need to think about with COVID. |
| 0:24.1 | And if so, what does that mean for the world's second biggest economy? |
| 0:27.4 | Is China's zero COVID policy doomed to fail? |
| 0:32.3 | The government is obviously very worried because Ammitron travels much faster. |
| 0:38.2 | And the Chinese system depends on speed. |
| 0:41.4 | So the system will not be fast enough. |
| 0:44.4 | That's all to come on Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:52.3 | Omicron is spreading at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant. |
| 0:58.6 | There's an urgent situation and we need to act urgently. |
| 1:01.6 | We are seeing a very substantial rise in a number of cases. |
| 1:04.8 | We've got hospitalizations rising quite steeply in London. |
| 1:09.9 | This is not the time for parties and social evenings in large groups. |
| 1:14.4 | Omicron has reached more than 80 countries in the world now. |
| 1:17.7 | It's a nightmare that's pooking investors. |
| 1:19.9 | And the reality is that Omicron is probably in most countries, |
| 1:24.5 | even if it hasn't been detected yet. |
| 1:29.2 | Well, as all those health warnings pouring in from major officials do suggest, |
| 1:35.3 | Omicron really has changed the calculus around our escape from this pandemic. |
| 1:39.8 | In just a few weeks, it's gone from being an obscure new variant detected in South Africa |
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