Exactly a week ago I wrote about concern in China that the country’s zero-Covid policy was going to lead to another lockdown, potentially doing further damage to the country’s struggling economy. Yesterday the NY Times reported the small outbreaks driving the lockdowns have continued. As a result, more than 250 million people in China are under some kind of lockdown at the moment.

Just days after China’s economy reported its worst quarterly performance in more than two years, officials have shown no sign of abandoning the “zero Covid” policy that has upended social and economic life in the country. The outbreaks have been relatively small, at most a few hundred cases in most places. But Chinese officials, acting on orders from the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, are pulling out all the stops to stamp out outbreaks soon after they emerge.

About 264 million people in 41 cities are currently under full or partial lockdowns or living under other measures, analysts at Nomura, the Japanese bank, wrote in a note on Monday. Last week, the figure was about 247 million in 31 cities, they said…

At least 2,000 tourists found themselves stranded over the weekend in Beihai, a popular beach resort town in southern Guangxi province. Authorities there imposed a surprise lockdown after detecting more than 700 locally transmitted cases during the past week.

According to CNBC, very few of the recently reported cases involve symptoms and none have resulted in deaths.

Mainland China reported 108 new Covid cases with symptoms and 827 without symptoms for Tuesday. The western province of Gansu and Guangxi accounted for the majority, but at least a handful of cases were reported in 12 other province-level regions.

The surge to hundreds of cases a day has only occurred in the last week and a half. The mainland reported no new deaths from Covid during that time.

So the lockdowns and mass testing seem pretty extreme given that even the people who catch this don’t seem to be very sick. But there were some reports earlier this year that if the virus were allowed to run though the country unchecked it could result in well over a million deaths.

China risks a “tsunami” of coronavirus infections resulting in 1.6 million deaths if the government abandons its long-held Covid Zero policy and allows the highly-infectious omicron variant to spread unchecked, according to researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University.

The peer-reviewed study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, found that the level of immunity induced by China’s March vaccination campaign would be “insufficient” to prevent an omicron wave that would swamp intensive care capacity, given low vaccine rates among the elderly and the virus’s ability to evade immunity from existing shots.

That would be a PR disaster that Xi Jinping doesn’t want to deal with at the very moment he’s preparing for a third term as the country’s leader. China is a one-party state but still a million deaths would lead to some opposition within the party that might spoil his plan to be seen as Mao’s equal. So the mass testing and lockdowns will continue even if the economy takes a serious hit from it.