China's Social Media Catches Up to Pandemic Memes as Zero COVID Ends

China's main social-media services Weibo and WeChat were awash with a combination of relief and apprehension this week after the central government announced a sudden end to its years-long zero-COVID protocols.

For the first time since the pandemic began in late 2019, residents in Beijing's largely shielded communities are coming face to face with COVID-19 or learning of acquaintances who have been infected.

The loosening of once-stringent public health rules such as lockdowns and daily mass testing mean official case numbers are declining, but there's little doubt that the virus is spreading in what is China's first real nationwide wave.

Some say President Xi Jinping, after personally leading the zero-tolerance campaign against the epidemic, may have been swayed by the political unrest in Shanghai, Beijing and elsewhere in late November.

Others believe he may finally have listened to the dire forecasts about the Chinese economy, which has underperformed in 2022 amid COVID controls and rising unemployment.

Whatever it was that ultimately persuaded China's leaders and propaganda apparatus to change course on the dangers of COVID, the public is now coming to terms with the fact that there remains little option but to learn to live with the virus, just as the West, and eventually Asia, has had to do for the last two years.

For some on Weibo, it came as something of a relief that China could afford to reopen during the prevalence of the Omicron variant, which has shown to be highly transmissible but less likely to cause severe disease than the original virus that struck Wuhan. Still, the speed of the government's reversal was dizzying, and captured in one popular joke:

Public: When are we reopening?

Beijing: Ten.

Public: Ten months? Ten weeks?

Beijing: Nine, eight, seven...

The every-man-for-himself memes that flooded Western social-media websites amid the early chaos of the pandemic are now emerging in China, too. The government has asked citizens not to hoard rations or stockpile medicines, but it's happening anyway.

There's a palpable sense that catching COVID is inevitable. China's leading health experts have started telling the public not to worry; the vast majority of cases are mild or asymptomatic, they say, and most people will recover at home.

After one WeChat user posted a picture of their sizable stash of fever medication, testing kits and other supplies, another replied: "It looks like you have everything you need. Now you just need an infection."

There remains an air of angst about China's reopening—unsurprising given state media's previous wall-to-wall coverage of mass deaths in the West to justify Beijing's zero-COVID policy. China's health care system is under-resourced, and many have underlying conditions.

Official statistics from late November showed at least 90 percent of China's 1.4 billion people were fully vaccinated. Many of its neighbors began transitioning out of strict virus controls before reaching that threshold, but Beijing has some cause for concern.

A recent study by Singaporean scientists, published in The Lancet, found elderly patients who had received three or four doses of Western mRNA shots were less likely to experience symptomatic disease or hospitalization, compared to those who had opted for an inactivated virus vaccine such as the one produced by China's Sinovac.

Many of China's double-vaccinated citizens will require a booster before the winter wave hits, according to a WHO recommendation one year ago.

But the government figures showed some 32 million over-60s and 8 million over-80s in China hadn't been vaccinated at all, while 21 million over-80s, roughly 60 percent of the age group, haven't received a booster shot.

At a talk organized by Beijing's Tsinghua University on Tuesday, Feng Zijian, former No. 2 at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and now a senior health adviser, said 60 percent of the population, or 840 million people, could be infected at the peak of China's first wave—more than the current worldwide case count of 647 million.

In a paper published in Nature Medicine medical journal in May, based on vaccination rates in March, Chinese and American scientists predicted that a COVID wave could overwhelm China's hospitals and lead to 1.55 million deaths.

Online, witty internet users are girding themselves for a surge in infections in the only way they know how—with a healthy dose of dark humor. After three years of on-and-off lockdowns, "the pandemic has finally started," said a joke on Chinese social media.

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