Weekly coronavirus-related chat, questions, and minor updates - week of November 21

Employees at COVID-stricken iPhone factory in China beaten, detained after protests (Associated Press, posted by MarketWatch)

The ruling Communist Party is trying to contain the latest wave of outbreaks without shutting down factories and the rest of its economy as it did in early 2020. Its tactics include “closed-loop management,” under which workers live in their factories with no outside contact.

Foxconn offered higher pay to attract more workers to the Zhengzhou factory to assemble the iPhone 14, which sells starting at $799 in the United States.

On Tuesday, a protest erupted after employees who had traveled long distances to take jobs at the factory complained that the company changed terms of their pay, according to an employee, Li Sanshan.

Li said he quit a catering job when he saw an advertisement promising 25,000 yuan ($3,500) for two months of work. That would be a significant hike over average pay for this type of work in the area.

After employees arrived, the company said they had to work two additional months at lower pay to receive the 25,000 yuan, according to Li.

“Foxconn released very tempting recruiting offers, and workers from all parts of the country came, only to find they were being made fools of,” he said.

Videos online showed thousands of people in masks facing rows of police in white protective suits with plastic riot shields. Police kicked and hit a protester with clubs after he grabbed a metal pole that had been used to strike him. People who shot the footage said it was filmed at the site.

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Protests have flared as the number and severity of outbreaks has risen across China, prompting areas including Beijing, the capital, to close neighborhoods and impose other restrictions residents say go beyond what the national government allows.

More than 253,000 cases have been found in the past three weeks and the daily average is increasing, the government reported Tuesday. This week, authorities reported China’s first COVID-19 deaths in six months.

With record covid cases, China scrambles to plug an immunity gap (Washington Post)

Chinese authorities, who on Thursday reported a record 31,656 infections, are scrambling to protect the most vulnerable populations. They have launched a more aggressive vaccine drive to boost immunity, expanded hospital capacity and started to restrict the movement of at-risk groups. The elderly, who have an especially low vaccination rate, are a key target.

These efforts, which stop short of approving foreign vaccines, are an attempt to keep the virus from overwhelming a health-care system ill-prepared for a flood of very sick covid patients.

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Major cities including Beijing, Guangzhou and Chongqing have ordered residents in certain neighborhoods to stay at home. Shopping malls, museums and schools have been closed once more. Major conference centers are being turned back into temporary quarantine centers, reflecting the approach adopted in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic. Some of the tightest restrictions are for nursing homes, with 571 such facilities in Beijing implementing the strictest tier of control measures and preventing all but essential exit and entry.

Opening to a world that’s now mostly living with the virus would cause a wave of deaths, officials fear. China’s vaccines initially were limited to adults ages 19 to 60, a policy that continues to have repercussions for vaccination rates today. Just 40 percent of Chinese older than 80 have received a booster shot, despite months of campaigning and gift-giving to encourage uptake. (Among people older than 60, two-thirds have gotten a booster.)

Since the beginning of the pandemic, China has relied solely on domestic vaccine makers. It approved nine locally developed options, more than any other country, with the earliest and most-used vaccines coming from state-owned Sinopharm and privately owned Sinovac. Both received approval from the World Health Organization early last year after being found to significantly reduce deaths and hospitalizations.

Sinopharm and Sinovac distributed their products widely throughout the world as part of a Chinese push to become a leading provider of global public goods and to improve China’s image. Yet in late 2021, demand for Chinese vaccines started to dry up as Pfizer’s and Moderna’s production and distribution increased.

China has still not approved any foreign vaccines or explained its decision to shun what could be an effective way to plug its immunity gap. A visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Beijing in early November ended with an agreement for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to be made available to foreigners living in China via the company’s Chinese partner, Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical.

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China is instead trying to develop 10 of its own mRNA candidates. The one furthest along is from biotechnology group Abogen Biosciences and the state-run Academy of Military Medical Sciences. Indonesia approved it for emergency use in September, but it has not received the nod from Chinese regulators and may not get that until data is available from Phase 3 clinical trials in Indonesia and Mexico. The trials are expected to conclude in May.

Other options in China include an inhalable vaccine developed by CanSino, which has been available in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou since October. A Chinese-developed antiviral drug, Azvudine, originally used for HIV patients, was approved to treat covid in July. Traditional Chinese medicines are widely used.

But new and more-effective vaccines remain a top priority, and the country’s leading pharmaceutical companies are poised to mass-produce them. CanSino is completing a production facility in Shanghai that will be able to manufacture 100 million doses a year — after receiving approval.

Doctors Debate Study That Found Masks in Boston-Area Schools Cut COVID Rates

The study, published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, examines what happened when school districts in Boston and Chelsea kept their mask mandates for 15 weeks after Massachusetts dropped the requirement this February. The researchers determined that those cities avoided about 45 COVID cases for every 1,000 students and staff members, based on the COVID rates of the other 70 school districts in the Greater Boston area.

While there is no debate among top Boston doctors about whether masks are effective at preventing the spread of COVID-19, experts in the field continue to disagree on whether masks should be required in schools.