According to The Guardian, “To let the virus loose now, with low vaccination rates among older people, and reliance on the less effective domestically produced vaccine, would be likely to result in significant disruption and death. Because China’s death toll is so extraordinarily low – due in part to the manner of reporting – many people see less reason to be vaccinated, but also less reason to be locked down. At least some residents are asking whether, thanks to vaccines, there is a wiser middle path between letting the virus rip and attempting elimination, which seems increasingly futile thanks to the highly transmissible Omicron variant.”
What a f***ing mess! I have no idea how or why this globally connected “superpower” believes it can isolate itself from a highly contagious respiratory disease that repeatedly boomerangs around the world. I understand the devastation that would ensue from COVID on the loose in a population of 1.4 billion, but how long does China expect to hold out? Unfortunately, they do not have a very effective vaccine, so their entire population is under constant threat of being under-immunized. It’s not like a city comes out of lockdown and everybody has immunity. No! It’s just the opposite! What they have done is to avoid herd immunity. Shanghai, for example, could emerge from a month of lockdown and isolation and then go right back into lockdown with one too many positive tests. How many lockdown cycles can China endure if it has no intention to immunize its population — naturally or medically? How many years can this go on? COVID is here to stay forever.
Sure, at the beginning of the pandemic, China was prospering while the rest of the world struggled, but now the rest of the world has moved on, and China still clings to ineffective containment protocols. How does it look now that everyone else has moved on and China is stuck playing Whac-A-Mole? The harder they dig into a “zero COVID” policy, then the more ridiculous it becomes. At some point, most of the rest of the world will have a relatively high enough herd immunity to resist pandemic-level infection. However, China’s population will still be comparatively defenseless. Their policy is beyond stupid at this point. Hello, morons of China! You can’t control COVID like you control your government and your people. Ironically, the U.S. actually stumbled into one of the best practices to achieve herd immunity — mass vaccinations, natural infections, and the deaths of anti-vaxxer RepubliKKKlans, MAGA morons, evil evangelicals, and QAnon kooks, thereby culling the herd of stupid who cannot get reinfected and infect others. Win-win!
Keep it up, China! One thing you guys are actually proving is that the world supply chain can no longer rely on you, something that has been long overdue for countries to recognize. America should not be doing business with China in the first place. Perhaps one of the gravest foreign policy blunders was Nixon’s trip to China. But I digress.