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Chinese lock down11/21/2023 ![]() ![]() 7, even as the bodies pile up in crematoriums and fever clinics. China maintains that there have only been seven deaths since the zero-COVID policy effectively ended on Dec. The withdrawal of the onerous testing system has moved China from one extreme to another, with citizens forming social media groups to work together to find testing kits which are suddenly in short supply. The official figures are an increasingly ludicrous fiction. Reliable numbers are impossible to obtain. Overconfidence and over-investment in zero-COVID measures, combined with political demands and propaganda, have left health care workers uncertain as to what to do and the Chinese public dangerously vulnerable. The years of the pandemic were spent shoring up zero-COVID controls to extremes, not expanding the health care system. These countries escaped the extremely high infection rates of the first year of the pandemic in countries such as the United States despite omicron waves, putting their decision-making in stark contrast to China’s.Ĭhina’s comparative success or failure won’t be clear for years, if ever, but the picture on the ground so far ranges from disappointing to frightening. ![]() Other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, abandoned strict containment policies but were able to contain hospitalizations and deaths because they had used the time they bought for themselves to vaccinate their citizens, educate their publics, and build up health care supply chains. Streets once empty because of lockdowns are now empty because people are only venturing out to get medicine. The COVID-19 wave now surging across the country is hitting a deeply underprepared health care system. But Beijing hasn’t used that time wisely. Since successfully containing the first Wuhan outbreak in April 2020, China has had more than two and a half years to prepare for the end of its zero-COVID policy, which placed strict restrictions on a public increasingly tired of life under lockdowns. ![]()
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