2023-01-11 - COVID-19 in China

It's striking how little press coverage there is about the COVID-19 situation in China. The sheer number of infections and deaths beggars belief, but through a combination of bald-faced government lies in China and Western press disinterest, nobody is talking about it.

The numbers are mind-blowing. China wasted 3 years in harsh lockdowns and failed to properly vaccinate its population or build up either hospital capacity or stockpiles of medicines. When president Xi's idiotic "zero COVID" policy inevitably collapsed, mass infection of an immunologically naive population ensued. What's going on in China right now is a horror show.

Obviously, CCP control over media means we don't know exactly how many people are dying, but it's pretty easy to work out a range of figures:

• In Canada, we had about 50,000 total COVID-19 fatalities in a population of about 38 million people, for a death rate of about 0.0013 per capita.
• In the USA, with lots of "Republitard" citizens refusing social distancing, masking or vaccination, the mortality was about 1.1M out of a population of about 335M, for a total of about 0.0032/capita.
• Canada has about 8.8 ICU beds per 100,000 people. The US has about 14.5. China only has about 3.6 ICU beds per 100,000 and this figure is key to reducing fatalities amongst seriously ill COVID-19 patients (ourworldindata.org/grapher/intensive-care-beds-per-100000).
• There has been some talk about the possibility that Omicron variants are less deadly than earlier (Alpha, Delta, etc.) variants of COVID-19. This is simply not true - what's going on is that populations that already have some immunity to earlier variants, through vaccination or infection, are not as strongly impacted by subsequent infections with new variants, such as Omicron. Since the Chinese population is immunologically native (no useful vaccination, no history of infection), they will be made just as sick by Omicron as they would have been with earlier variants.
• Canada had excellent vaccination rates, especially amongst the most vulnerable (old and sick), using modern and highly effective vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. The USA (see Republitard note above) had a lower but still respectable vaccination rate. In contrast, the Chinese vaccines were not very useful against the alpha strain of COVID-19, are totally inffective against more recent strains and (weirdly) old and sick Chinese avoided the vaccines anyways, because they were afraid it could be worse than the disease and did not trust their government.

From the above, we can predict that the death rate in China will be materially higher than in the US (ineffective vaccine which was not adopted by the most vulnerable people anyways, poor hospital capacity). Lets say .004/capita to 0.006/capita. China has 1.4 billion people, so this translates to 5.6M to 8.4M dead people.

Read that again. 5.6 to 8.4 million people in China have died already or will die in the coming months, and nobody is talking about it. Imagine that everybody in the Greater Toronto Area or everyone in Quebec were to die in a period of six months. That's the scale of the carnage.

How did we get here? Obviously, bad governance. Here's a laundry list of the stupid things China has done to accomplish this cataclysm:

• Allow COVID-19 to spread out of control in the first place. Recall: this should rightly be called the "Wuhan virus" because of where it was first found and recall that CCP lies allowed the virus to spread in the first place.
• Fail to procure known-good Western vaccines, and instead try to develop something domestically. This is due to placing national pride over common sense or a desire to save lives.
• Fail to immunize the elderly and infirm, instead allowing messages of "this vaccine might be dangerous, avoid it if your health is not strong" to circulate, even amongst doctors in China.
• Fail to build up health care capacity.
• Promote domestic treatments, including Traditional Chinese Medicine (which is not medicine in any sense of the word - it's just ignorant superstition) and domestically developed and produced (and often ineffective and poorly quality controlled) medicines over Pfizer and Moderna products, mostly due to "national pride" (just another form of stupidity).

What will the impact of this be?

• As much as we'd love to see that happen, the CCP in general and Xi Jinping in particular will come out of this unscathed. Recall the "great leap backwards" in the 1950s where Mao's economic mismanagement led to tens of millions of Chinese dying of starvation? The CCP stayed strong. Tiananmen Square protest? Tanks took care of that. The CCP cannot be so easily removed, even when they cause millions of deaths.
• China's economy will be hurt for 6-12 months due to dead and sick workers, but after that they will reach herd immunity the hard way, and will rejoin the global economy in full force.
• China's prestige in the world will hopefully be somewhat impaired. Hopefully. Somewhat.
• That's it - minor consequences for large-scale man-made carnage.

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