The End of China's Zero-Covid Policy with Dr. Jennifer Bouey

Note: As current events regarding Covid are rapidly changing, we want to acknowledge that this episode was recorded in early January 2023.

In this first episode of our 2023 season, Dr. Jennifer Bouey, an expert on global health equity and security, is here to make sense of zero-Covid's sudden end in China. 

Following the 20th Party Congress last fall, the signal from the top seemed to suggest that China would continue to stay the course on zero-Covid. Few could have imagined the sudden dismantling of the policy.

Days before the Lunar New Year, China reported nearly 60,000 Covid-related hospital deaths for the first five weeks of the current outbreak. But many experts believe that number is still low. As physicians in China told Reuters, they are discouraged from citing Covid on death certificates. Relatives of those whose deaths were related to Covid say the disease did not appear as a cause of death on official documents.

The number of deaths is also a lagging figure; one infectious disease model reported in the journal Nature suggests that the current wave peaked ahead of Chinese New Year in many parts of China, which means the number of deaths could surge over the holidays and beyond.