The catastrophe has just recently started to manifest itself, with years of suffering, millions of deaths, and a massive society on the verge of collapse, as reported by The Telegraph.
New covid cases
The municipal health chief of Qingdao, a city of about 10 million people in China’s eastern Shandong province, recently said that there are “between 490,000 and 530,000” new Covid cases a day there.
Qingdao, said Bo Tao, had yet to reach its peak infection rate.
The report of Bo’s comments, first carried by a Communist Party news outlet in the city, was later edited to remove the case figures.
Internal Chinese central government numbers are far higher.
Some 250 million people got Covid in the first 20 days of that month.
Change in policy
“Have you seen hell?” asked one Chinese resident on Twitter, referring to a frantic scene in a hospital corridor. Hell is now seen throughout China. There was almost no preparation for the radical change.
The December 7 announcement is characterised as a “change in policy.”
In reality, Beijing capitulated to the virus.
The World Health Organization says the current “explosion” of cases is not the result of the abandonment of zero-Covid, and that appears correct.
3 major reasons
And there are three other reasons Beijing surrendered to the disease. First, the Chinese people, in a series of extraordinary protests beginning in late October at the iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, made it clear they would no longer accept the draconian Covid-control measures. After the November 24 fire in Urumqi, protestors across the country took to the streets to demand that Chinese ruler Xi Jinping and the Communist Party “step down”.
Second, localities, which bore the financial burden of implementing zero-Covid, could no longer afford it. Even the Beijing municipality was beginning to run out of money.
Third, zero-Covid was crippling an already struggling, debt-burdened Chinese economy. Official numbers for last month, especially those for trade and retail sales, suggest gross domestic product this quarter is contracting on a year-on-year basis. The Party simply lost the ability to keep zero-Covid measures, which Xi Jinping fully backed, in place.
Vaccine nationalism
His “vaccine nationalism” (he refused to import mRNA vaccines) meant the Chinese government favoured seven local vaccines that are largely ineffective against the Omicron variants rampaging throughout the country.
Such that experts project somewhere between 800 million to 1.1 billion infections in China this winter.
Deaths in the next few months could reach 2.1 million.
Videos show people in Shanghai resorting to burning the bodies of loved ones in the street.
China’s outbreak will, in all probability, become our outbreak as well.
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Source: The Telegraph
