"Two Health Experts Say China’s Haste To Re-Open Risks Needless Death And Disruption" By Eyck Freymann

In the weeks since Chinese authorities suppressed the anti-lockdown protests that began on November 25th, the “zero-covid” policy has been turned on its head. Under the pretext of following the democratic will, Chinese authorities have lurched from excessive caution to a hands-off approach.

Beijing is already experiencing a major outbreak. The rest of China is probably close behind and will face a massive wave in January. But because the government reversed its longstanding policy without a roadmap to reopening, undervaccinated elderly citizens have not been given enough time to get a booster shot. The result is likely to be more than a million deaths over the next few months– hundreds of thousands of them preventable.

By Invitation | Covid-19 in China 'Two health experts say China’s haste to re-open risks needless death and disruption' Eyck Freymann and Yanzhong Huang say the government’s new approach is worrying. Dec 13th 2022

Eyck Freymann is a CWP fellow for 2022-23. Previously he was a doctoral candidate in China Studies at the University of Oxford, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is Director of Indo-Pacific and global pandemic coverage at Greenmantle, a New York-based advisory firm, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College.

In the 2022–23 academic year he will be a joint Fellow at the Arctic Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Columbia-Harvard China & the World Program.

Freymann’s first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard UP 2020), is assigned as required reading in Harvard’s “United States and China” introductory course for undergraduates. He also writes on a range of other current affairs topics, including U.S. politics and foreign policy and COVID-19. Freymann’s writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Economist, and The Atlantic, among others, and he is a reporter and columnist for The Wire China.

Freymann holds two masters degrees in China Studies: the first from Harvard University and the second from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Harvard-UK Henry Scholar. He earned his bachelors degree cum laude with highest honors in East Asian History from Harvard College.

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/mohamed_hassan-5229782/