China Is Facing an Explosion of COVID Cases: The Chinese People Are Paying the Bill for the Mistakes of Xi Jinping and the CCP.
The Chinese do not understand how a virus could change from ultra dangerous to harmless in such a short time on a simple decision of Xi Jinping ...
After three years of patient construction, the sanitary dam set up by the Chinese government against COVID-19 has finally broken. And the Omicron variant is likely to take everything in its path. In Beijing, until mid-November 2022, the virus remained a marginal phenomenon. Since then, cases have multiplied at a dizzying pace.
The policy of systematic screening has been abandoned on December 7, 2022, and no more public data is verifiable. But a survey published on December 15, 2022, by The Beijinger magazine among 3,000 expatriates in the capital indicates that 9% of them had COVID-19 before December 1, 2022, 58% since that date and that only 33% did not catch it. Of those who tested positive, 30% had only mild symptoms, 52% moderate, and 14% severe or very severe. These numbers seem credible.
There are many indications that negative people are now in the minority among the 22 million Beijingers.
At the gates of some residences, the number of guards has dropped by 75% in a few days. A district of Beijing, Fengtai, is asking healthy and vaccinated residents to volunteer to fill in for the missing couriers, who have become indispensable in this ghost town where everyone stays at home and shops online.
Hardly believable change
Cathy Niu was infected on December 11, 2022. “We are 2,000 employees in my company, and 90% have already been infected. In my team of fifteen, only two went to the office today, the rest are working remotely,” said the Beijing-based marketing company. “You need a PCR test to enter our building, but even those who are negative prefer to avoid the office these days.”
Within a week, everything has been turned upside down: “Because people have tested positive at their workplace, only those continue to come in. The negative people stay home. It's a change you can hardly believe,” says a Chinese employee of a state-owned company.
In Beijing, where schools only operate remotely, “40 percent of the students have a mark on their foreheads indicating that they have a fever,” said a mother. And not all of them are attending classes. While hospitals seem to be holding up, the number of people placed in intensive care increased by 37% between December 12 and 15, 2022. On Friday 16 December 2022, staff at some Beijing crematoria said they were working around the clock to cope with the demand.
According to the Radio Free Asia website, an employee of Dongfeng Hospital estimates that, due to the number of positive employees and the increase in the number of deaths, families have to wait five to seven days for the cremation of the deceased. Yet, according to the official count, the last death from COVID-19 in the country was on December 3, 2022.
According to several accounts, Wuhan is also a ghost town.
No longer because, as three years ago, the authorities are imposing a lockdown, but because, due to a large number of cases, residents are holed up in their homes. “It looks like about 60% to 65% of the population is affected,” notes one Western observer. “Of course I'm positive. But anyway, my business has been closed for a week because everyone is sick,” said a restaurant waitress. “I'm sick, but it's not that bad. This is the price to pay for freedom,” said a civil servant. “It's about time the situation changed. The problem is that the population does not know who to trust. The experts have sold their souls to the propaganda,” said a doctor.
In this doctor's line of fire were some experts who explained that there was no alternative to the zero-COVID policy until December 7, 2022 ... and then, when this strategy was abandoned, suddenly declared that the virus was just a cold and that there was nothing to worry about.
From one extreme to the other
As a sign of the deterioration of the situation in a large part of the country, the Shanghai authorities announced on Saturday, December 17, 2022, that all the schools in the city would switch to distance learning as of Monday, December 19, 2022, except the 3rd and 12th-grade classes.
Paradox: China is de facto reconfiguring itself at the same time as the country is abandoning its zero-computing policy. Under a wave of protests, centralized lockdowns and systematic testing were abandoned on December 7, 2022, and travel tracking on December 13.
But, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), these measures are less the cause than the consequence of the current epidemic. “The explosion of COVID-19 cases in China is not related to the relaxation of the zero-COVID policy. It started long before that,” observed Michael Ryan, head of the WHO's health emergencies program, on December 14, 2022.
Indeed, the Chinese government seems to have been caught off guard.
“From a purely public health perspective, we would have preferred to delay the new measures a bit and wait for the vaccination rate to be higher, but the central government makes its decisions based on several considerations such as economic development, social stability, employment rate, and international relations,” acknowledged Zeng Guang, an epidemiologist who is advising the Chinese government on COVID-19 management, on Friday, 16 December 2022.
“I'm quite concerned that the public discourse has shifted from one extreme to the other: there is now a lot of communication that you don't have to be afraid of the virus, that it's not dangerous,” said Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. “That's true for young people who are vaccinated, but for older people who haven't received at least three doses of vaccine, as recommended by the WHO, it's dangerous. We may quickly see hospitals under pressure and, unfortunately, many severe cases, after three years of very effective control of the epidemic in China.”
The danger is everywhere and Chinese society is more divided than ever on the issue
On the other hand, many Chinese people, especially among the young, are looking forward to regaining relative freedom of movement. In a gym in Shanghai, on Monday 12 December 2022, a 28-year-old user said: “I hope to catch the virus as soon as possible so that I can go on vacation at the end of December.”
This feeling, which seems largely shared by the youth, frustrated by three years of restrictions, is not shared by all generations.
Mrs. Li, 86 years old, lives in an alley in the former French concession of Shanghai. She no longer leaves her house and has fired her cleaning lady. “I just came back from the hospital with a foot problem, but the doctors told me not to come because I might get infected. Why did they have to open now? It was working very well until now, I understand that the economy was not doing very well, but for us, the elderly, it is very dangerous,” she exclaims.
In Xi'an, in the center of the country, Mrs. Bai, 85, understands the need to reopen and hopes to avoid infection by avoiding going out. “Even if it's just bad flu, for us old people it can be difficult. Reopening is going to be painful, but confining it wasn't good either,” she believes. The epidemic wave is not about to stop: in at least two provinces in China, Hebei, and Henan, hospital staff has already been asked not to leave their posts during the Lunar New Year celebrations in early 2023.
The Chinese people are once again paying the price for the poor decisions made by Xi Jinping and the CCP in managing COVID-19.
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