Commentary on Political Economy

Wednesday 19 January 2022

HAN CHINESE HAVE LOST THEIR MARBLES...NOW THEY'RE LOSING THEIR PETS!

 Pets the latest sacrifice in China’s attempt to hold fortress COVID-zero

Eryk Bagshaw

By Eryk Bagshaw

January 19, 2022 — 7.31pm

Save

Share

Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text size

1

View all comments


For our free coronavirus pandemic coverage, learn more here.


Singapore: The Little Boss pet store in Hong Kong did not expect to find itself in the middle of China’s war on COVID.


The pet calendars had been ordered for a busy year: rabbits would star on the front, and the chinchillas, guinea pigs, and hamsters would follow.


The store worked overtime during Christmas and New Year, only closing for one day during the holiday period as they met the insatiable COVID-driven demand for pets.


Workers with Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department remove small animals from the Little Boss pet store. 

Workers with Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department remove small animals from the Little Boss pet store. CREDIT:BLOOMBERG


The staff joked that one rabbit said it could be a model, but it had “no intention of stealing the spotlight”. A chinchilla was caught looking at its reflection. “Look in the mirror, dress up,” the photo was captioned.


By Wednesday the photos of the animals were followed by a three-lettered message on Instagram – “RIP”.


A chinchilla at Little Boss in Hong Kong, where there has been a positive COVID case

A chinchilla at Little Boss in Hong Kong, where there has been a positive COVID caseCREDIT:INSTAGRAM @LITTLEBOSS_HK


The animals were to be “humanely dispatched” Hong Kong’s Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department said. They were not the only ones.


The Department strongly advised members of the public on Wednesday to “surrender their hamsters purchased in local pet shops on or after December 22.”


Worried that some owners may dump their pets from fear of catching COVID, the Department warned that they should in no circumstances “abandon their pets on the streets”.


About 2000 hamsters will be killed after traces of COVID-19 were found on 11 linked to the Little Boss pet shop. Hong Kong authorities claim the imported hamsters could have led to the infection of two employees of the store. All the other animals in the shop will also be euthanised as a precaution.


At a government-run animal centre the AFP spoke to a man named Hau whose 10-year-old son was said to be deeply distraught about culling his pet hamster “Pudding”.


“I have no choice – the government made it sound so serious,” Hau said.


There has been little research done on the transmission of COVID from hamsters to humans, although findings in the Science Journal found that humans had introduced COVID to minks in Denmark, which then may have been transmitted back to humans. 17 million minks were killed for being receptive to the disease in November 2020.


But more than a year on from the mink cull, the hamsters’ doom, perhaps more than any other recent example, has highlighted a growing divide between China and the rest of the world on strategies for managing COVID-19.


In Hong Kong and eight of China’s largest cities, Delta and Omicron are on the rise and authorities are resorting to more extreme measures to keep the virus at bay. Its largely successful management of the virus to date has meant it is now dealing with two variants, not one, in a population that is heavily immunised but with less effective vaccines.


Chinese President Xi Jinping at the National Speed Skating Oval in Beijing a month before the start of the Winter Olympics.

Chinese President Xi Jinping at the National Speed Skating Oval in Beijing a month before the start of the Winter Olympics.CREDIT:AP


Dr Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital in Singapore, said China could maintain COVID-zero, but “at an incredible price”.


“If they lock down the cities and force everyone to do swabs routinely two times per week, they will reduce it to zero,” he said. “The question is, is it sustainable?”


Leong said opening up was also potentially “a disaster in the making” because Omicron causes a vertical rise of cases in all countries it enters and Hong Kong University data shows the Chinese-made vaccines offer minimal protection against the variant.


“It will be seen as an ultimate failure of the pharmaceutical deliverables. China wants to play ball with the big pharma boys. And the rhetoric that their vaccines work has been touted aggressively by the government,” he said. “It may just fall flat on their face.”


RELATED ARTICLE

The Olympic rings at Shougang Park in western Beijing’s Shijingshan District.

Winter Olympics

Beijing’s rocky road to the 2022 Winter Games

That has left Chinese authorities determined to maintain China’s COVID-zero by effectively sealing its borders and taking increasingly extreme measures to shut down any local transmissions while the rest of the world is learning to live with the virus.


In Beijing on Tuesday, Pang Xinghuo, a senior health official told residents to stop buying goods or receiving letters from overseas after authorities claimed that a person was infected after receiving a letter from Canada.


“We come to the conclusion that the possibility of virus infection through inbound objects cannot be ruled out,” said Pang.


In Guangxi, along China’s border with Vietnam, fruit imports have been banned after traces were found on dragon fruit packaging, leading to trucks laden with rotting fruit piling up along the border.


Health experts, including the World Health Organisation, say it is unlikely that people could catch COVID from food packaging.


Alina Chan, a Canadian molecular biologist, said on Wednesday that the chances of catching the disease this way were “near impossible” unless recipients were aerosolising and inhaling their letters.


“If scientists are too fixated on mythical SARS-CoV-2 transmission via international mail, they might miss the actual community transmission of the virus,” she said on Twitter.


Play Video


China under pressure to deal with Omicron spread

Play video

1:33


China under pressure to deal with Omicron spread


Omicron has brought fresh challenges to China's strategy to quickly extinguish local outbreaks, an approach that has taken on extra urgency in the run-up to the Winter Olympics starting on February 4.


For Beijing, each theory represents part of a narrative that China has fuelled from the beginning of the pandemic: COVID was imported into China from overseas before the first cases were discovered in Wuhan in December 2019.


The framing has helped convince residents that the pandemic is defeatable as they endure months of snap lockdowns, compulsory mass testing, and up to 21 days of isolation.


So far, China’s sharp restrictions have netted some results – Tianjin, which went into lockdown on January 8, on Sunday said that most new infections had been confined to quarantine.


But in other parts of the country, the virus is continuing to spread.


There have been more than 1000 new domestically transmitted infections in the past two weeks – China’s highest number since March 2020 and the timing could not be worse.


The Beijing Winter Olympics are now only a fortnight away, and they will coincide with the largest annual migration in the world – the Spring Festival for the Lunar New Year. The annual festival will see more than 1 billion trips taken across the country as workers return to their home towns from the major cities.


That leaves authorities treading a fine line between allowing some residents’ freedom to travel home while putting them under the constant threat of being stuck under harsh restrictions. Economists have warned that strategy is leaving it exposed.



“The blame can be laid on Omicron restrictions crimping domestic economic activity,” said OANDA senior Asia Pacific analyst Jeffrey Halley.


“Cases are quietly climbing in mainland China and Hong Kong, along with widening restrictions, and with COVID-zero policies in place, Omicron presents a serious growth risk to China if it fully jumps the fence.”


Business is growing increasingly anxious. A survey by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong on Wednesday found that 30 per cent of respondents had delayed investments in the city because of travel restrictions, while another 30 per cent had struggled to fill senior executive roles. More than 40 per cent of foreign individuals surveyed and 25 per cent of companies in the city said they were more likely to leave because of the restrictions.


The economy may be struggling, but China’s President Xi Jinping shows no signs of letting up on his pursuit of conquering COVID as he moves towards securing a third term in power in the second half of 2022.


He told the World Economic Forum on Tuesday that this Lunar New Year will bring in the year of the tiger.


“To meet the severe challenges facing humanity, we must ‘add wings to the tiger’ and act with the courage and strength of the tiger to overcome all obstacles on our way forward,” he said.


Xi said governments must do everything necessary to clear “the shadow of the pandemic”.


“Facts have shown once again that amidst the raging torrents of a global crisis, countries are not riding separately in some 190 small boats, but are rather all in a giant ship on which our shared destiny hinges,” he said.


They may be in the same storm, but China is rowing in the other direction.

No comments:

Post a Comment