China’s next stage of the pandemic

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: ‘China’s next stage of the pandemic’

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Wednesday, December 7th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

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The price of oil continues its downward spiral. And China needs to figure out how to keep Covid cases low now that it’s lifting lockdowns. Plus, more women in the UK are turning to sex work as the economic environment worsens. The FT’s Alexandra Heal will explain how this sector is becoming even more dangerous now. I’m Marc Filippino and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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Markets are still reeling from a stellar report on the state of the American services sector. The report from the Institute for Supply Management on Monday showed hotter than expected services data. Investors started to panic that the news would cause the Federal Reserve to keep raising interest rates to fight inflation. The oil market in particular felt the effects yesterday. The price of Brent crude fell 4 per cent to its lowest level since January. US stocks also slid. The S&P 500 shed 1.4 per cent yesterday.

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The Chinese government is lifting tough Covid restrictions. Large protests around China have forced President Xi Jinping to walk back pandemic controls. But now Beijing has another problem its got to deal with — how to keep Covid cases from rising without further sweeping lockdowns. They might think the answer is just getting everybody vaccinated. But the FT’s Ed White says it’s not that simple.

Edward White
Basically, there’s a lot of risk-averse elder Chinese out there that don’t necessarily trust Chinese-made medical products. Others have been lured basically into a false sense of security because China has had these relatively low case numbers, particularly on a kind of international comparison basis. And also, many don’t really understand why the vaccines aren’t stopping transmission of the virus altogether. So there’s kind of a fundamental misunderstanding, which is quite widely held around what the vaccines for the coronavirus are actually meant to do.

Marc Filippino
And the government is loosening the lockdowns in China. Is it too early to know whether this is going to start a jump in cases?

Edward White
So a key point is that one of the moves that Beijing has made as part of its pivot towards loosening is to drop a lot of the testing requirements now. And this was an onerous restriction people needed to test so that they were given the all-clear, which then meant with their contact tracing, they were able to get in and out of buildings and on and off public transport and into the office and all of that kind of thing. Now, by dropping the testing requirement, you instantly don’t have the same sort of data around case numbers. But what everyone in the outside world knows is that when you go down these paths out of Covid restrictions, you inevitably get exit waves. And these are huge month-long spikes in cases. This is the period where the pandemic is most deadly and that the health systems at most of risk of overwhelm. And so the decision to test less seems to be quite flawed. And I think it’ll be one that people will be calling for it to be readdressed.

Marc Filippino
So clearly lifting Covid restrictions is a health risk, right? And one projection actually shows that if the Omicron variant goes unchecked in China during the winter months, it could cause around one and a half million deaths. But Ed this is also a political risk. President Xi staked a lot of his popularity on his success in handling Covid, right?

Edward White
The problem that they have now is that over the past three years, and nearly three years since the first outbreaks of coronavirus out of Wuhan in early 2020, is that over that time, they haven’t addressed this elderly vaccine rate and they also haven’t boosted the healthcare spending in the right areas and in particular into ICU capacity, which will be completely overwhelmed very, very soon if this spike in cases does occur. And so I think that the option that people had expected Xi to take to at least keep the coronavirus controls through winter, the idea would have been that they would have got through winter and then use that last time to really try as much as they could to get the elderly vaccinated and do what they could around the healthcare system. However, it seems that that option hasn’t been taken, and so we’re left in a situation where China seems to be going down a path where the healthcare system is going to be overwhelmed. And that will obviously carry immense risks for Xi on a political front.

Marc Filippino
Ed White is the FT’s China correspondent.

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Just a warning to our listeners. The next story deals with mature content. More women are turning to sex work in the UK. It’s driven by the worsening economic outlook as a recession looms large. And some women see sex work as the only way to make ends meet. I’m joined now by Alexandra Heal. She’s part of the FT’s visual storytelling team and did extensive reporting on the industry. Hi, Alex.

Alexandra Heal
Hi. Thanks for having me on.

Marc Filippino
So, Alex, you and a colleague interviewed 23 UK sex workers for this story and more than a dozen charities who work with sex workers. Do you have a sense of how many women are joining or rejoining this area of work?

Alexandra Heal
Um. It’s actually impossible to put concrete numbers on it for the whole UK. And that’s because a lot of the formats in which sex work happens in the UK is illegal. Some of the organisations did have concrete data. A sex worker outreach project in Sheffield said that the number of times that its service was accessed nearly doubled in the July to September period this year, compared with the same period in 2019. But interestingly, one thing I would add is that the English Collective of Prostitutes, they said that many of them are mothers and they are literally kind of tearing their hair out, worried about how they’re going to pay for the next, just one specific bill. In September, there was quite a spike in women calling for advice because they were going to work just to pay for their children’s school uniforms or the time school meals.

Marc Filippino
Wow. So a lot of pressure on these women to make ends meet. Is it helping?

Alexandra Heal
It’s a mixed picture. But unfortunately, for a lot of the women, it doesn’t seem to be helping because demand is dropping because their customers are affected by the same cost of living crisis and are less able to pay. For example, in Sheffield, women are only earning this year £10 to £15 per client in the low income kind of part of the Sheffield sector. And that’s basically halved from about 20 to 30 before the pandemic. And so to me, that’s a really, really shocking kind of finding.

Marc Filippino
So, Alex, sex work is, of course, very dangerous on a . . . it’s a very dangerous field. But the way I understand it from reading your story is that it’s actually become more dangerous during this period of financial uncertainty.

Alexandra Heal
Absolutely. Several of the women that we spoke to said that as a result of the kind of falling demand that they’re seeing, they are having to see riskier clients that they wouldn’t usually see in order to be able to earn money. And even ones that are their usual clients some of the women were saying are being a bit more pushy and aggressive because they know that women this year are more desperate. And that ranges from anything from women reported men, especially on the street, kind of pushing for free add ons, you know, services that the women wouldn’t normally offer, and quite dangerous services.

Marc Filippino
So given how dangerous things have gotten, is there anything that can be done to make sex work safer, Alex?

Alexandra Heal
So yeah, many campaign groups are saying that the kind of economic circumstances that we’ve been reporting on do add renewed urgency to the need to review the laws that they say make sex work in the UK far less safe. In the UK, it is actually perfectly legal for two consenting adults to exchange sex for money in private premises. So advocates of full decriminalisation say that fully decriminalising, all consensual selling and buying of sex in all circumstances would make women safer because it would allow proper regulation of the industry, give them labour rights. But there’s an opposing camp who argue that all purchase of sex is violence against women and that full decriminalisation would legitimise this exploitation. And they propose something called the Nordic model, which would decriminalise women so that they can still report violent men, etc. It would make all purchasing of sex illegal.

Marc Filippino
Alexandra Heal is a visual storytelling journalist for the FT. Thank you so much for your time, Alex.

Alexandra Heal
Thanks so much.

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Marc Filippino
You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.