China’s forever war against Kovid-19

First, thanks to the low prevalence of mild and asymptomatic cases in Wuhan, the disease was already present globally and in the US second, China’s Orwellian online and offline surveillance capabilities are being used to try and eliminate a flu. Look to be employed in a groundbreaking experiment. Like disease.

In the months that followed, these subjects would get together and have a baby: the world would likely make peace with a fast-spreading virus that causes mostly mild disease, and so would China.

And so far China has not done so, and the reason for this has been mostly overlooked. China has nothing like the critical-care facilities of Western cities. In dozens of metros bigger than any major city in the West, China will face millions more seriously ill and dying than it can care for. A preliminary study found that the original Wuhan outbreak, if repeated in the US, would require 26 intensive care beds per 100,000 citizens. America had these beds. China did not and still does not.

And yet an irony of the leadership’s decision to treat zero Covid as a national victory has been the slowness of expanding hospital capacity. Its stand-alone outlook on vaccine development, another alleged victory, has plagued China with substandard vaccines against Omicron and Delta. Weirdly continue to emphasize Chinese traditional medicine, which Xi Jinping calls a “national treasure” as a cure for COVID. The Beijing city government pushed the rules to make it an offense to “discredit” traditional remedies. China’s epidemiological diplomacy, from Belarus and Malta to Pakistan and even the World Health Organization, has focused on promoting traditional nostalgia against COVID-19.

Most notoriously, instead of freeing scientists to understand the origins of the virus, China’s propaganda has fueled tall tales about arriving at imported food or packages. Now it’s flying back in an ironic way. With the central government blaming local authorities for any zero-Covid failures, Beijing city officials turned the tables by saying the pre-Olympic outbreak was caused by foreign mail, the responsibility of the central government. China’s postal service then issued sterile orders to clear all incoming mail and urged citizens to refrain from eating imported frozen foods. Several cases in Hangzhou were soon blamed on an American company that manufactures food processing equipment.

Beijing decided to go ahead with the Olympics (and, yes, the opening ceremonies were spectacular) forced by the success story of the covid China selling its people and the world.

How badly can this go wrong in a country that has experienced impressively few Covid deaths? Omicron is believed to cause minor illness, but more than a billion Chinese probably lack the natural immunity enjoyed by Western populations. His government has not allowed him to benefit from Western mRNA vaccines. Remember the catastrophic devastation of the delta that ripped through India last year, a country with equally dense cities and equally spartan healthcare, but whose population is 10 years younger than China (the Chinese age structure is vulnerable to older people). percentage is similar to that of the US).

Naturally, the Communist Party won’t allow anything like India’s disaster to happen, but it appears to be the only one to quell outbreaks by rushing to fix vaccine problems and delay repairing its healthcare system. There are more harsh, repressive efforts for Shanghai, with 26 million people, was recently warned by a leading virologist to prepare for “hundreds” of cases. It won’t cut it. The hype on the benefits of traditional medicine is reappearing. It won’t cut it either.

The end is not near for China’s zero-Covid experiment, although there is much hope for change after next autumn’s Party Congress. Australia is the closest parallel, having moved from zero Covid to “living” virus. Australia has a political system that allows regime change; Its voters may choose to be the scapegoat for rising cases and deaths that are now challenging its health care system. The Communist Party has no such mechanism. Disease surveillance is rapidly changing to inpatient surveillance. China’s economy, which helped supply the world with manufactured goods during its Covid fight, is now facing a strain on global recovery due to domestic lockdowns. Watch out for China’s propaganda to become even more militant in an attempt to portray Covid as a foreign conspiracy.

In case you’re wondering, the balance of that column 24 months ago was devoted to the key question for the future: why China, with its peasant agriculture and later its urban wet markets, has long been the primary source of new flu-like epidemics. .