Whats going on with COVID in China

I have been following COVID-19 case statistics from China for some time and this analysis begins with that dataset (The New York Times has a nice tracker visualising it). The numbers have since the relaxation of zero-COVID, of course, become irrelevant but were relevant for this analysis and for the time period pre-relaxation.

The outbreak beginning in early August initially had the same shape as the one in February, and the expectation was that it would follow the earlier curve. By mid-August, it became clear this was not going to be the case and some important conclusions could be drawn from this. With the powerful tools that the Chinese state has at its disposal they could certainly have put out the flame and returned the curve close to zero if they had decided to.

That this did not happen can only mean that they chose not to. It became clear to me that they were considering relaxing their zero-COVID policy and that they had started experimenting with how they could do this as safely as possible for their people and for the regime.

China’s zero-COVID policy in practice ended mid-August.

At this point in time, I made some forecasts. I predicted that they would begin the relaxation soon after the congress and that they would do so at a fast pace. The reasoning for these predictions will follow below.

The relaxation was obviously not going to come before the congress, and at this point there were three clear choices moving forward.

1. Begin the relaxation soon after the congress
2. Begin the relaxation after the two sessions in March
3. Keep the zero-COVID policy for an extended period of time

This situation was not a good place for Xi Jinping and China’s leadership to be in due to all options carrying considerable risk. Putting all things together, I believe that they chose alternative one because it would be less risky and more convenient to do so before the transition of the full new leadership and the clean slate of having this problem surpassed would mean moving forward. Because of this I also forecasted that the push would be fast and hard, with the goal of being able to declare mission accomplished come March.

I also believe that many had begun to view keeping the policy as carrying the highest risk of the alternatives, mainly due to the obvious damaging effects the policy had on geopolitical, economic and social stability issues. Many valuable lessons from the period had also already been drawn and this factor no longer advocated for a continuation.

Therefore, alternative one was chosen but not without a twist. The models I use in my analysis tell me that option one would not have been chosen if the risk it contained was not lowered. This was probably done in two main ways, but as we are entering speculation, I will not elaborate.

I think we are going to see far fewer deaths than initially projected.

Update 2026-08-19: Corrected grammar and spelling (going through old posts using a new tool). The content of the text was not changed in any way.

Update 2026-08-19: Changed the sentence “Many valuable lessons from the period had also already been drawn and this factor no longer advocated for a continuation.” to bold print.