Covid runs rampant through China

This is not a typo:

A Shanghai hospital has told its staff to prepare for a “tragic battle” with COVID-19 as it expects half of the city’s 25 million people will get infected by the end of next week, while the virus sweeps through China largely unchecked.

The number currently infected in that city is estimated at 5.5 million. Yeah, that’s right. They expect 7 million new cases in one week in one city.

After years of enforcing a zero-COVID policy, China’s government has ended its harsh anti-COVID restrictions and now seems to have no plan at all, other than to hide the numbers. Officials have currently taken a page from the Trump playbook – “If we don’t conduct any tests, the official numbers will stay low.”

This joke is currently circulating in China:

Three men who don’t know each other sit in a Chinese prison cell. Each explains why he was arrested:

“I opposed Covid testing.”
“I supported Covid testing.”
“I conducted Covid testing.”

10 thoughts on “Covid runs rampant through China

  1. Karl Radek (1885-1939). A relatively long lifespan for someone who was a pal of Tukachevsky, “the Red Napoleon” who had been Yezhoved (got an NKVD bullet in the brain stem) two years earlier.

  2. China’s problem is the Chinese Communist Party. As with most totalitarian countries, facts inconvenient to the government are suppressed. For instance, China prevented shots of crowds at the recent World Cup from being shown because most of those people were not wearing masks. The people have no power to hold government officials accountable. Individual officials may face punishments ranging from demotion all the way to execution. But only if they have angered a more senior official. It took massive, almost unprecedented, protests to get the government to ease its pandemic restrictions. But the reason so many people are getting very sick and/or dying is because China has thus far been unable to develop an effective Covid vaccine. If Xi Jinping really cared about the health and wellbeing of the Chinese people, he would have asked the West to make our highly effective vaccines available in China through either importation or licensing. But if he did either, he would be admitting that our vaccines were better. So instead, the Chinese government censors health information from beyond China and tells its people that things in China are actually better than they are in the rest of the world. This is what Thomas Friedman called a “drawback.”

    In 2009, Friedman wrote in the New York Times:

    “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

  3. This is the “herd immunity” approach that some of our dimmer bulbs were pushing two years ago.

    1. The point is that they have not had the chance to gain any immunity being locked up for the last 3 years.

      1. I agree. Zero tolerance was used quite successfully by a few small countries. But the approach was never going to be a permanent fix. It buys time. That’s all. At the end, you win if the rest of the world eradicates the pathogen. Otherwise, your next step is to have used that time to prepare for your own immunity drive. Be it vaccination or infection. You have to have a plan for when that time comes. If not… Congrats, you’re Xi Jin Ping.

      2. Yes, that’s right. Like I said, us two years ago (or pre-vaccine, whenever). Then just let people run around infecting each other and find out. I guess they figured there were too many people in Shanghai anyway. A mass die-off is a feature, not a bug. Some of the wackier ones here even said that quiet part out loud, if I remember correctly.

  4. Despite all their free-enterprise wealth, I see the Chinese have not lost the knack for Communist-type humor.

    1. The Chinese are some funny mofos. It’s as if an entire country was formed from Jim Carrey clones.

      1. That Chinese joke is actually an old Stalinist era joke from the USSR, though obviously not originally about Covid.

        1. 3 Russian men discuss why they are in prison:

          – I was jailed for supporting Radek.
          – Strange, I was jailed for not supporting Radek.
          – I am Radek.

          More:

          “You car purchase is approved, we will deliver it to you in 10 years.”
          “Are they coming in the morning or afternoon?”
          “Why does that matter, comrade?”
          “Because the plumber is coming in the morning.”

          Russian walks into a shop that appears completely empty:
          “If this is a dairy, why are you completely out of milk?”
          “You are mistaken, comrade, we are not out of milk. We have never been out of milk in the history of the glorious workers’ paradise.”
          “Then why are the shelves empty?”
          “This is a bakery. We are completely out of bread.”

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