The Covid epidemic presented a very difficult dilemma for politicians all around the world. The virus was rapidly spreading and deadly. But was it so deadly that draconian measures should be taken, or was it more like a potent flue? How should the number of deaths be weighed against the damage to the economy caused by Covid restrictions? And could the Covid restrictions be defended when they affected people’s personal freedom? Did the restrictions cause people to die from other diseases. Etc.

As we all now know, countries ended up handling the epidemic very differently. Some countries imposed repeatedly more or less draconian lock-downs to stop or slow the spreading, while others opted for laissez-faire and put very few restrictions in place. While studies are still ongoing to find out which approaches were the most effective, China’s recent change of policy has already led the mainstream media to conclude that China’s handling of the epidemic was a failure. Just a few examples: CNN: “How did it all go so wrong for Xi Jinping?”, BBC: “Zero-Covid: How Xi's flagship policy is spoiling his party!”, DW: “China's COVID-19 policy has failed”, and so on. It is now considered a fact that China failed in its Covid-policy. Don’t expect any “fact-checkers” to question that.

So let us do it instead.

To evaluate the different policies, it is common to look at the number of fatalities due to Covid. As the reporting of Covid fatalities is done so differently in different countries, and many countries deliberately are under-reporting them, the preferred way of doing it to look at excess deaths: compare the number of fatalities in the years 2020 and 2021 with the average number of fatalities in the period before the epidemic (often taken as 2015-2019). It is a very rough measure, as many other factors can be at play, but it is now generally accepted as the most acceptable way of doing it.

But what about all the other effects of the policy? The limitations to personal freedoms? The psycological damage? The damage to the economy? Etc. We shall here limit us to two things: excess fatalities and economic growth, and then see how China and other big countries have fared. For the excess fatalities we use excess deaths per 100,000 people in 2020-2021 from an article in the scientific medical review Lancet from March 2022, and for economic growth we use World Bank data for GDP based on purchasing power, updated with the latest projections for 2022 from IMF and other more recent sources.

For China, Lancet calculates the excess deaths in 2020-2021 to 17,900, which corresponds to 0.6 per 100,000 people. And economic growth 2019-2022 was 13.8%. For the US, the excess deaths were 1.13 million (179 per 100,000 people), and economic growth was 5.2%. For Europe (minus Russia, Ukraine and Belarus), the excess deaths were 1.8 million (around 200 per 100,000 people), and economic growth in the EU was 1.4%. So using this rough measure, China fared much better than the leading Western countries. Below this article there is a table with the details for the bigger economies. And, by the way, did I mention that inflation in China was 2% in 2022?

Yes, but…… What about the many excess deaths in China since December 2022, when the virus was allowed to spread freely in China? Does that not change the comparison? We can’t say for sure before the data on excess deaths in China in 2022 and 2023 become available, but it is unlikely to do so. Several alarmist projections have been made predicting 1 to 1.5 million excess deaths in China, see for example this comparison of the predictions in New York Times. Even if the most pessimistic predictions should come true, the results from China will still be much better than for the leading Western Countries, taking into account the size of the Chinese population. China has no doubt been favoured by the fact that it is the much less deadly Omicron variant that was spreading, and that a very high proportion of the population was vaccinated.

For those who don’t believe the low number of excess deaths in China, take a look at Australia and New Zealand, where a zero-covid policy was also followed during 2020-2021. The lancet figures indicate negative excess deaths in Australia and extremely low numbers for New Zealand. So it is absolutely possible.

There is another puzzle, however: in 2022, when it was supposed that the epidemic was largely over, there was still a high number of excess deaths in many countries. In the UK, it is reported that there was 9% more fatalities in 2022 than in 2019, so the excess mortality was 54,000 people – presumable the worst in the last 50 years. A similar excess mortality of around 9% was reported by Eurostat for the EU in 2022. Australia, which reported negative numbers for 2020 and 2021, had 20,000 excess fatalities in 2022. Even Denmark, which was relatively successful in controlling the epidemic, also reported an excess mortality rate of 9% for 2022.

Actually, I would personally have expected the contrary: as the epidemic has killed so many vulnerable people, death rates should have gone down afterwards. Several explanations have been given for this paradox: the heatwave in Europe in summer 22, the wear on the health system during the epidemic, debilitation of many people infected by Covid (“long covid”) etc. And then of course the anti-vaxers blaming the vaccines. Even if the excess mortality in 2022 is a worldwide phenomenon, there are indications that countries where fewer restrictions were imposed and which had higher mortality in 2020-2021, have experienced lower mortality in 2022 (compare for example Denmark with Sweden).

However, regarding China, the conclusion is clear: based on excess deaths and economic growth, China has been very successful in its response to Covid-19, and much more successful than EU and the US. If China had had the same mortality as for example the US, around 5 million Chinese would have died from the epidemic. The cost of this policy has been the restrictions to the personal freedoms during the lock-downs, which finally caused the popular discontent in China in November 2022. China would probably have been better off starting lifting the restrictions in the beginning of 2022, when the less mortal Omicron variant was spreading, instead of waiting until the end of the year. But it is of course easy to be clever in hindsight.

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Source: Excess deaths from Lancet. GDP PPP growth 2019-2021: World Bank. GDP growth 2022: IMF. World Economic Outlook (October 2022), and other more recent projections.

*) The excess deaths in “EU” is approximated by adding Western, Central and Eastern Europe, and subtracting Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.