How Will China Fare With Covid? ‘Meaningless’ Data Clouds the Picture.

“My feeling now is that everyone is afraid of testing positive, and those who are timid dare not go out,” she said. Relaxing the country’s Covid rules is a good first step, but the government needs to do more to support ordinary people and small businesses, Ms. Zheng said, adding that “nothing is certain at the moment.”

Ting Lu, chief China economist for Nomura, a Japanese brokerage, said he wasn’t “too optimistic” about a sharp recovery in the Chinese economy, because he expects continued disruptions from an overwhelmed health care system and a surge in infections. He added that he expected pent-up demand in the economy to be “relatively weak” next year after three years of lockdowns depleted the finances of many Chinese households.

Part of the uncertainty hanging over how China will emerge from “zero Covid” is that no country of this size has pivoted this quickly, this drastically — shifting seemingly…

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