How bad is the covid outbreak in China?
So bad that no amount of propaganda or media manipulation can hide it. So, China’s president Xi Jinping made the only sensible move and finally admitted the draconian Zero Covid policy was a failure.
The premier acknowledged ‘unprecedented difficulties and challenges’ in his New Year’s Eve address to the nation, and said it was ‘only natural’ that his harsh lockdown measures were met with resistance.After the huge unrest, Xi dropped the Zero Covid measures on December 7 but his new strategy of living with the virus has caused infections to skyrocket, with infections currently peaking in Beijing.In the first 20 days of December, the government’s top health authority estimates a staggering 248 million people – equivalent to 18 per cent of the population – contracted the virus….In his address, Xi broke his silence on his sudden policy pivot last month that freed millions from virtual house arrest, mandatory testing, closed borders and quarantine camps.He said China is now in a new phase of Covid control which is ‘optimised’ to protect lives and the economy.
Meanwhile, the American press is back to clutching pearls about “variants.”
“China has a population that is very large and there’s limited immunity. And that seems to be the setting in which we may see an explosion of a new variant,” said Dr. Stuart Campbell Ray, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.Every new infection offers a chance for the coronavirus to mutate, and the virus is spreading rapidly in China. The country of 1.4 billion has largely abandoned its “zero COVID” policy. Though overall reported vaccination rates are high, booster levels are lower, especially among older people. Domestic vaccines have proven less effective against serious infection than Western-made messenger RNA versions. Many were given more than a year ago, meaning immunity has waned.The result? Fertile ground for the virus to change.“When we’ve seen big waves of infection, it’s often followed by new variants being generated,” Ray said.
You can certainly tell that the U.S. presidential campaign season is beginning, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (and likely 2024 candidate) insists that this country should shut down travel from China.
He warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping has a plot to infect the world and spread a new COVID-19 variant after ‘the whole world has been through hell.’China, which has the most stringent COVID-19 restrictions still in place, announced last month that it would start allowing travel out of and into the country following three years of ‘zero COVID’ policies.Several countries, including the U.S., immediately said Chinese travelers would be required to test negative for coronavirus before boarding flights.’It sounds like we might have as many as 1 million Chinese people infected. Fifty percent of their population traveling,’ Pompeo told Cats Roundtable host John Catsimatidis in a Sunday interview.
I would suggest that the pandemic-prevention policies that Pompeo and others should focus on include the halting of “gain of function” research entirely, culling bureaucrats who were responsible for funding Wuhan’s bat virus research, and denying further grants to scientists who participated in the experiments (and then manipulated the media to deny the possibility of a lab-leak-origin for the virus).
We are going through many waves of different covid variants, and travel bans and mandatory testing will not stop the spread of these viruses. The better approach is to prevent another franken-virus from being created in the first place.
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