Beijing’s zero-Covid pivot is fanning a rally in companies offering traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) products, after local health officials touted its efficacy as a cure, while the government prepares to downgrade the disease.
A China Securities index tracking 50 companies in the TCM sector jumped 3.8 per cent on Monday in the biggest advance in nearly 4 weeks. Almost all 73 TCM-related stocks gained, with at least five soaring by the 10 per cent daily limit, according to data provider Eastmoney.
The National Health Commission released a new guideline on Covid-19 treatment last Friday, listing more than 30 TCM products for patients with mild Covid-19 symptoms. Most people will recover within three to five days, officials said.
The effect of Chinese medicine, combined with Western treatment, “has proved to be remarkable in treating symptoms such as fever, sore throat, cough and fatigue,” Xinhua News Agency reported on Monday, citing Liu Qingquan, who is president of the Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicines.
Beijing has tweaked its zero-Covid policy twice within a month, issuing guidelines to local government officials to soften its approach to the zero-Covid regimen. They included scrapping daily mass testing, stringent quarantine rules for positive cases and dropping the use of domestic health codes.
Guizhou Bailing Group Pharmaceutical, Jinghua Pharmaceutical, Dali Pharmaceutical and Shaanxi Panlong Pharmaceutical, whose main products include cold medicines and cough syrups, all jumped by 10 per cent, the most in at least a month.
Shijiazhuang Yiling Pharmaceutical, the producer of Lianhua Qingwen that gained popularity during the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, climbed 1.7 per cent to 51.75 yuan in Shenzhen. The stock surged 23 per cent last week.
China reported 8,626 infections on Monday versus 10,597 on Sunday, the health commission said. Confirmed cases have been declining for over a week, even as looser curbs stoked worries about a resurgence in new cases.
With daily infection cases sliding from record-high levels of more than 40,000 in late November, authorities are said to be considering lowering Covid-19 from the highest category of infectious diseases.
The rate of serious illness and death of Covid-19 is similar to that of influenza, Cai Weiping, an infectious diseases specialist with the Guangzhou No 8 People’s Hospital, was cited as saying on news portal Cn-healthcare.com.
China might soon treat Covid-19 as a common flu with declining death rate, Wei Hongmei and Xie Xiongxiong, analysts at Dongguan Securities, said in a research note on Sunday. “Demand for [traditional] medicines will explode in the near future”, enabling the TCM index to outperform the broader market by 10 per cent in the next six months, they added.
Yiling Pharmaceutical, Yunnan Baiyao, Pien Tze Huang and Tongrentang, the four biggest TCM index members with a combined weight of 30.7 per cent, gained 1.4 per cent to 4.5 per cent on Monday.