China’s low elderly vaccination rate shows key vulnerability

Bloomberg

Only half of Chinese aged 80 and older are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, highlighting a key vulnerability as the country grapples with its worst outbreak since Wuhan and the prospect of reopening to the world.
About 51% of over 80-year-olds have received two shots and some 20% have gotten boosters, health officials told reporters at a briefing in Beijing. While 87.9% of China’s 1.4 billion people have been vaccinated with two shots — a high percentage globally — the numbers decline with age, with the figure dropping to 82% for those between 70 and 79.
Of the 264 million Chinese aged above 60, 52 million are yet to be fully vaccinated, officials said.
It’s the first time China has fully broken down its elderly vaccination numbers, and they’re concerning. They show the country is at risk of a situation like Hong Kong’s where an even larger proportion of elderly people is unvaccinated — some 63% of those over 80.
Elderly people have accounted for more than half the city’s deaths in the current Covid-19 wave, its worst of the pandemic with new cases now in the tens of thousands each day. Nearly 5,000 people have died in Hong Kong since early February, up from less than 300 at the start of the year.
The data comes as President Xi Jinping pledges to adjust China’s Covid-fighting approach so that it’s less disruptive to the economy.
Beijing is trying to walk a line between maintaining the curbs that keep the virus out — and have delivered China one of the lowest Covid death rates — while keeping the engines of growth firing as the rest of the world opens up.
The numbers also show why China is reluctant to ease its strict Covid Zero strategy just yet, with lockdowns, border curbs and mass testing being increasingly deployed in the world’s second-largest economy as a series of omicron clusters from Shenzhen in the south
to Jilin province in the northeast flares.