America's Jealousy of China's Covid Success
American news media has been dutifully smearing Chinese efforts to contain Covid-19 as authoritarian and draconian. The popularity and massive success of the programs tell a different story.
Now that it is America’s new main hegemonic rival, China is often the target of criticism in the Western press, which has adopted the old McCarthyist red scare tactics previously employed to great effect against the Soviet Union to downplay and discredit its successes, especially regarding its comparably life-saving management of the Covid-19 pandemic. The recent Winter Olympics in particular drew a flurry of mostly nonsense criticism from Orientalist commentators. Yet despite complaints by embedded Western reporters about China’s protective measures, the LA Times concedes that its ‘head-scratching’ measures were successful in containing the virus during the games:
But the precautions — focused on the bubble that’s cut off from the rest of society — appear to have worked.
Organizers reported no new positive tests Saturday for the second time in three days, leaving the total coronavirus cases linked to the Games at 437 since Jan. 23.
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More than 1.7 million total tests on bubble residents turned up 171 cases, including 68 athletes or team officials since Jan. 23, with the remainder of the cases from testing at the airport on the Games-related 13,600 arrivals.
Somehow, the games continued despite these supposedly authoritarian measures to keep everyone in attendance safe. Indeed, China’s containment of the disease during such a large international event should be considered nothing short of miraculous, and some commentators are waking up to this fact:
It worked. Participants testing positive recovered in the loop, with many continuing to compete. Speaking at a press conference on Feb. 18, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach said the infection rate at the event stayed at 0.01%. He called the closed loop “one of the safest” places on Earth.
Although some athletes pushed back against the rigors of Beijing’s approach, the Winter Games demonstrated China’s capability to keep Omicron at bay—something no other country has done effectively. They reveal just how much cooperation, organization, and expenditure are required to stage a large scale international event safely. Grépin calls the Olympics “an enormous planning effort,” based on “two years of really good data and evidence in terms of how COVID-19 spreads.”
Compare this to the April 2 Gridiron Club dinner in Washington DC, during which at least 72 of the around 630 guests were infected with Covid, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. It is evidently possible to carry out some kind of gathering safely; our choice not to do so is just that, a choice.
For every journalistic admission of China’s success, there are multiple misguided smear pieces from critics who aim to tear it down. The newest of these comes courtesy of Li Yuan, who writes in a The New York Times op-ed that “Beijing has ignored experts’ advice that China abandon its costly strategy and learn to coexist with the coronavirus, especially a milder, if more infectious, variant.” This is nothing short of dangerous propaganda, the kind we might expect from denialists such as Joe Rogan, Alex Berenson, or Leana Wen, not from anyone given a platform in America’s premiere newspaper of record. There are two major issues with her central thesis: one, the idea that coexisting with the disease is possible or advisable has led to a disastrously premature abandonment of Covid prevention policies in the West (which were lacking and unenforced to begin with), even minor adjustments such as masking and calling in sick; two, a “milder, more contagious” variant is only slightly less damaging in certain cases—the “mild” chestnut should have been abandoned months ago. She might have come to agree with this point had she done a cursory google search about newer variants’ persistent health complications and lack of conferring immunity, a few of which follow:
Heart-disease risk soars after COVID — even with a mild case: “Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease. What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.”
Even mild COVID-19 raises the risk of blood clots: “According to a nationwide Swedish study published in the journal BMJTrusted Source, individuals with COVID-19 could be at a 33-fold greater risk of developing serious blood clots in their lungs in the first 30 days of infection than those who have not contracted the virus.”
Study links even mild Covid-19 to changes in the brain: “People who have even a mild case of Covid-19 may have accelerated aging of the brain and other changes to it, according to a new study.”
What It’s Like to Have a Mild COVID-19 Case: “Just because an infection is mild ‘doesn’t mean you are not susceptible to a more serious issue in the future. Although many people are tired of this pandemic and feel that 20 months is enough, we still need to learn so much more about the long-term impacts on COVID-19 survivors,’ says [Dr. Jose] Mayorga.”
A quarter of symptomatic kids hit by long COVID: “Among the 80,071 children with COVID-19 in the studies, 25% developed symptoms that lasted at least 4-to-12 weeks or new persistent symptoms that appeared within 12 weeks, researchers reported on Sunday on medRxiv ahead of peer review.”
The next COVID variant may not be mild like omicron, study says: “In a searing condemnation of ‘misconceived and premature theories’ about the demise of COVID-19, the authors — microbiologists at the European Commission and the University of Oxford — take aim at what they call the “persistent myth” that the virus will evolve to be benign.”
US likely 'dramatically undercounting' current COVID-19 resurgence, experts say: “Although officials have been warning for weeks of an impending coronavirus resurgence across the country, health experts say it is impossible to know exactly how widespread the nation’s latest resurgence may actually be, given the declining availability of COVID-19 data.”
Herd immunity now seems impossible. Welcome to the age of Covid reinfection:
However, this is far from the position we’re in. The rising number of documented reinfections, sometimes occurring relatively quickly after the initial infection, as well as the high number of infections with the Omicron variant among the fully vaccinated, means that herd immunity is likely impossible – even if seroprevalence hits 100%. Relying on herd immunity to manage Covid-19 rather than on the strategies of east Asian countries to suppress it until a vaccine was available was a gamble that Britain took early in March and unfortunately lost.
The endemic nature of Covid in fact argues for increased protective measures, not against them. Herd immunity is impossible and the “mild” variants are neither all that mild nor indicative of what is to come.
Yuan goes on to argue that the disease has been politicized in China, and that Xi Jinping seeks to “use China’s success in containing the virus to prove that its top-down governance model is superior to that of liberal democracies.” She even concedes that the lockdowns, despite some unacceptable outcomes related to food scarcity and lack of access to medical care (especially among the elderly), are overwhelmingly popular, a fact brushed aside when she states that “with limited access to information and no tools to hold the authority accountable, the vast majority of Chinese generally support whatever the government decides.” Dissent is clearly possible, though, as she refers to complaints about the lockdowns posted to Chinese citizens’ social media accounts, dissident writers, and even government officials. These are very obviously the exceptions to the rule in terms of the lockdowns’ popularity. Even in America, where anti-masking and anti-distancing propaganda are rife, support for Covid controls is prevalent in 2022t:
Even as the pandemic situation sharply improves and protective mandates are lifted, just a third of Americans see the coronavirus as mainly controlled – and six in 10 say it's more important to try to contain the virus than to lift restrictions on normal activities.
Fifty-eight percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll continue to prioritize controlling the spread of the virus, 20 percentage points more than the share (38%) who say it's more important to discontinue restrictions.
Continuing on, Yuan focuses on the potential economic fallout of the lockdowns:
As the Omicron variant spreads, about 373 million people in 45 Chinese cities were under either full or partial lockdowns as of Monday, according to estimates by economists at the investment bank Nomura. These cities account for 26 percent of China’s population and 40 percent of its economic output, they wrote; they warned that the risk of recession was rising as local governments competed to ratchet up virus-containment measures.
Who knows what kind of economic downturn China would have suffered had they copied the US strategy and allowed it to scythe through its working population? Meanwhile, in the land of opportunity:
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic fallout caused significant hardship. In the early months of the crisis, tens of millions of people lost their jobs. While employment began to rebound within a few months, unemployment remained high throughout 2020. Improving employment and substantial relief measures helped reduce the very high levels of hardship seen in the summer of 2020. Nonetheless, considerable unmet need remained near the end of 2021, with 20 million households reporting having too little to eat in the past seven days and 10 million households behind on rent. In early 2022, some 3 million fewer people are employed than before the pandemic, though steady progress has been made, including in recent months.
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Nearly 20 million adults — 9 percent of all adults in the country — reported that their household sometimes or often didn’t have enough to eat in the last seven days, according to Household Pulse Survey data collected September 29–October 11, 2021. When asked why, 82 percent said they “couldn’t afford to buy more food,” rather than (or in addition to) non-financial factors such as lack of transportation or safety concerns due to the pandemic.
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Adults in households with children were likelier to report that the household didn’t get enough to eat: 12 percent, compared to 8 percent for households without children. (See Figure 3.) And 7 to 13 percent of adults with children reported that their children sometimes or often didn’t eat enough in the last seven days because they couldn’t afford it. Households typically first scale back on food for adults before cutting back on what children have to eat. (The 7-13 percent range reflects the different ways to measure food hardship in the Household Pulse Survey.)
Also, analysis of more detailed data from the Pulse Survey shows that between 5 and 9 million children lived in a household where children didn’t eat enough because the household couldn’t afford it. These figures are approximations; the Pulse Survey was designed to provide data on adult well-being, not precise counts of children.
Black and Latino adults were more than twice as likely as white adults to report that their household did not get enough to eat: 17 percent for Black adults and 16 percent for Latino adults, compared to 6 percent of white adults. Adults who identify as American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, or as multiracial, taken together,[5] were more than three times as likely than white adults to report that their household did not get enough to eat, at 19 percent.
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Despite these measurement challenges, the slow rollout of emergency rental assistance and high pre-pandemic levels of housing hardship meant that millions still had difficulty paying rent late in 2021. An estimated 12 million adults living in rental housing — 16 percent of adult renters — were not caught up on rent, according to data collected September 29–October 11, 2021.[7] Here, too, renters of color were more likely to report that their household was not caught up on rent: 28 percent of Black renters, 18 percent of Latino renters, and 20 percent of Asian renters said they were not caught up on rent, compared to 12 percent of white renters. The rate was 18 percent for American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and multiracial adults taken together.
In addition, 23 percent of renters who are parents or otherwise living with children reported that they were not caught up on rent, compared to 12 percent among adults not living with anyone under age 18.
US mishandling of the pandemic has been so costly that China’s life expectancy has now rapidly overtaken our own:
Changes to life expectancy amid the Covid-19 pandemic widened an existing gap between the US and other high-income countries, the new report shows. Among a set of 19 peer countries, life expectancy dropped only a third as much as in the US in 2020 (down 0.6 years, on average) and rebounded in 2021, with an average increase of about 0.3 years.
Life expectancy in the US fell from 78.9 years in 2019 to 76.6 years in 2021 -- now more than five years less than the average among peer nations.
China’s life expectancy actually increased in 2021, to 77.3 years. This alone should give us pause, but an even more startling comparison might be the total number of deaths: in the US, that number is over one million. In China, it is under 5,000. Many will of course be quick to accuse the government of a coverup, but in fact Covid deaths throughout the world are regularly covered up, especially in the US and India, in order to avoid a “panic” and justify the business as usual approach—there is nothing to suggest that China’s comparably incredible numbers are being significantly faked for similar reasons. Ask any Chinese citizen about the possibility of such a massive coverup and they will quickly confirm that hundreds of thousands of deaths would have been noticed and the whistle swiftly blown.
None of this is meant to argue that the Chinese response is perfect (and insofar as it results in lack of access to medical care or food for some, should be adjusted), and it is certainly undermined by Western propaganda and political maneuvering. However, in terms of public health it is a stirring success, especially when compared to the US response, which was half baked at the best of times and is now unravelling entirely. The logic behind the Chinese zero-Covid response is sound, and its imperfections do not invalidate its clear superiority over the US response, despite pro-Western commentators’ attempt to blame public health concerns for incidental government missteps (the Chinese government is perfectly capable of historic and ultimately costly blunders). Coronaviruses are here to stay, however, and it is clear that smearing actually successful government health policies as “authoritarian” and “draconian” is only going to get more people killed as new variants inevitably emerge and nations’ already-strained hospital systems break down further. The other major threat facing the human race, climate change, is going to accelerate both this systemic breakdown and the prevalence of disease. From an interview with Sonia Shaw, author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond:
We often look at an outbreak as a foreign problem — like Ebola and SARS and Zika are coming from outside and encroaching upon us. That’s the traditional narrative: the germ invading from outside. I call it microbial xenophobia.
But these are things that are happening right here in the United States. So for example, West Nile virus is a virus of migratory birds from Africa. They’ve been landing in North America for hundreds of years, but we never had West Nile virus here until 1999. Well, why is that?
It turns out that when you have a diversity of bird species in your domestic flock, you don’t get a lot of West Nile virus because birds like woodpeckers and rails are really bad carriers. So as long as you have a lot of those diverse bird species around, even if you have an introduction of West Nile virus from a migratory bird, you’re not going to get a lot of virus overall.
But what happened over the last 20 years or so is that we lost a lot of that avian biodiversity. Woodpeckers and rails became rare in a lot of environments. Instead, we have a lot of birds like crows and robins, which are generalist species that can live in any kind of degraded environment, and they’re really good carriers of West Nile virus.
So the fewer woodpeckers and rails you have around, and the more robins and crows you have around, the more West Nile virus you have around. And the more likely it becomes that a mosquito is going to bite an infected bird and then bite a human.
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It’s because we are building roads between wild animals and human bodies. We’re using up a lot of land — for our cities, our mines, our farms — and while doing that, we’re destroying wildlife habitat. That’s why 150 species are going extinct every day. And the species that are remaining have to squeeze into these tiny fragments of wildlife habitat that we leave for them.
When you cut down the forest where bats live, they don’t just go away; they come roost in the trees in your backyard or farm. That means it’s easier to have casual contact with their excretions.
If a little kid goes outside and plays near a tree where bats roost, they might pick up a piece of fruit that has some bat poop or bat saliva on it and put that in their mouth, and then you’ve created an opportunity for the microbes that live in the bat’s body to enter into a human body. We know that with Ebola, there was a single spillover event — the first case was a 2-year-old child in West Africa who was playing near a tree where bats live.
These are accidents waiting to happen. Now we have this amazing flight network, so even if pathogens emerge in a place where there aren’t a lot of transmission opportunities, they can easily get to somewhere where there are. We’re also urbanizing in an ad hoc fashion, so we have a lot of places where people are being exposed to each other’s waste. There’s not a lot of infrastructure in many of the places that are rapidly urbanizing. All these factors combine to increase the risk that a microbe will spill over into human bodies and then start to spread.
The header image for Li Yuan’s article “China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Mess Proves Autocracy Hurts Everyone,” seemingly meant to portray a frightening restriction of freedoms, might also be viewed in a more favorable way: the encircled population is being protected by the PPE-wearing healthcare workers, and they are grateful for it.