China, the Covid wave is rampant but Beijing reopens its borders. Tesla extends the stop to local production, Apple is also in trouble

The fallout from the new Covid 19 pandemic wave that is affecting China is intensifying. From Saturday the US automaker Tesla suspended production at its plant Shanghai, extending the planned eight-day shutdown at its largest plant. The stop is partly linked to the slowdown in demand but mainly to the spread of infections among factory employees. Barring new postpones production should resume from 2 January. Problems are also affecting Applewhose products are built and assembled largely in the factory Foxconn and Zhengzhou, in China. Due to the epidemic, Foxconn has moved part of its production to other plants across China but is struggling to keep up with the usual pace and waiting times for high-end Apple products remain unusually long. According to analysts this situation could cause a 8% drop in earnings in the last three months of the year with repercussions that will also drag on profits in 2023. It’s not just a problem with factories, Apple’s Beijing store had to reduce its opening hours because almost all of its employees were ill. A fifth of Apple’s revenue comes from sales in China and the Asian country over 90% of iPhones are assembled.

Daily infections in China may have reached and 37 million last week. In the first 20 days of December they became infected about 250 million people18% of the total. One million deaths are feared in the coming months. Despite the evolution of the situation, China has announced that it will reopen the borders and abandon the quarantine procedures for those arriving from abroad from next January 8th. The surge follows the government’s decision to abandon the policy’s harsh restrictions “Covid zero” which had caused widespread protests. A choice that, however, takes place while the vaccinated rate in the country remains low and the effectiveness of vaccines produced in China has proven to be significantly lower than that of Western drugs. Yesterday the National Commission for Health announced that it will stop publishing daily data on the evolution of infections and the number of victims (about whose reliability there were already doubts), complicating the monitoring of the spread of the virus. The fear of the experts is that this lack of information makes it more difficult to deal promptly with the possible emergence of new variants of the virus. Beijing today also called on the population to familiarize yourself with and apply the rules of personal hygiene which can help slow the spread of the epidemic. The Christmas period is particularly difficult to manage as many city workers return to the cities rural areas from which they come with the risk of favoring further spread of the disease.