Tag: Disease Rates

China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Efforts Come With a Cost

Chin@Strategy

China’s top leader has declared that the country has “overcome” the impact of the coronavirus, even as sporadic lockdowns continue in various areas and officials order greater scrutiny of imported frozen food and children’s clothes — both extremely unlikely sources of contagion. The stringent, if sometimes impractical, restrictions stem from China’s struggle to maintain its “zero Covid” strategy. Other nations have gradually loosened restrictions as they vaccinate more people, allow more gatherings with limits and bolster their health care systems for those who get sick. By contrast, the Chinese Communist…

Near-Daily Covid Tests, Sleeping in Classrooms: Life in Covid-Zero China

Chin@Strategy

The southwestern Chinese city of Ruili is small, remote and largely unknown internationally. It is also, when it comes to the coronavirus, perhaps the most tightly regulated place on earth. In the past year, it has been locked down four times, one lasting 26 days. Homes in an entire district have been evacuated indefinitely to create a “buffer zone” against imported cases. Schools have been closed for months, except for a few grades — but only if those students and their teachers do not leave campus. Many residents, including 59-year-old…

The Delta Variant and China’s Need to Change Its Covid-19 Policy

Chin@Strategy

“How lucky I was born in China,” a young Chinese scholar declared last month in his WeChat. He was proud: Following the worst domestic Covid-19 outbreak since Wuhan, China had brought daily new case counts down to a few dozen. The case numbers — when contrasted with the United States, which has less than a quarter of China’s population yet daily average cases above 130,000 — might not seem too concerning on their own. But they illustrate that China’s zero-infections policy is no longer working as designed. At the outset…

Rejecting Covid-19 Inquiry, China Peddles Conspiracy Theories Blaming US

Chin@Strategy

Wary of independent scrutiny, Beijing has tightly controlled efforts by the World Health Organization to investigate the origin of the outbreak, and it rejected the health agency’s recent call for a second phase of an inquiry that would look more closely at the lab theory. China has been ramping up its disinformation campaign ahead of the results of an investigation by American intelligence agencies, ordered by President Biden. The agencies delivered their report on the origin of the pandemic to the president on Tuesday but have not yet concluded whether…

Coronavirus Briefing: What Happened Today

Chin@Strategy

Inconclusive origins It’s been more than 18 months since the first cases of a mysterious “pneumonialike illness” were reported in Wuhan, China. The world still isn’t any closer to understanding how the pandemic started. The director of national intelligence delivered a preliminary report to President Biden on Tuesday about the pandemic’s origin. But officials have yet to answer the biggest question: whether the coronavirus was the result of an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab or whether it emerged naturally in a spillover from animals to humans. Officials have repeatedly…