There are 37 million Chinese in lockdown today after outbreaks of COVID-19 in several major cities, including the important port of Shanghai. But China’s vaunted “zero COVID” policy is showing signs of wavering as citizens are finally fed up and beginning to complain about it on social media sites.
Granted, these complaints are mild compared to what we see on Twitter and Facebook. But when you consider the penalties for speaking out about anything in China, the situation is probably worse than we can imagine.
Complaints from regular citizens have appeared with more regularity on the country’s heavily policed social media platforms. One user wrote Monday on the microblog Weibo that because of the sudden new lockdown measures, their family was trapped on a highway for 14 hours trying to reach the town of Wuxi in eastern China.
News that a 4-year-old girl in Changchun, one of the cities under strict lockdown, had died of acute laryngitis while waiting for a negative coronavirus test to go to the hospital prompted further anger online.
“Three years. I don’t dare get sick, and don’t even talk about having children. You don’t know what they might face,” one Internet user wrote under a hashtag for the issue that had been viewed more than 40 million times in two hours.
Western nations could never get away with China’s barbarous lockdown policies, which include draconian isolation measures and door-to-door “health checks” that allow authorities to take away anyone showing symptoms to a “quarantine center.”
It obviously didn’t work.
The bug is resisting all efforts to kill it, control it, manage it, or ignore it. It just “is,” and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it from spreading. Vaccines don’t stop it. Even”natural immunity” is failing us as the virus keeps coming back with new strategies to evade the antibodies we’ve created to battle it.
The CNN headline says it all: “Europe thought it was done with Covid-19. But the virus isn’t done with Europe”:
Covid-19 cases are rising in Britain just two weeks after UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson lifted most mitigation measures. Infections were 48% higher last week compared with the one before and hospitalizations were up 17% over the same period, CNN’s Brenda Goodman and Deidre McPhillips report.
The country’s daily case rate — about 55,000 a day — is still less than a third of what it was during the Omicron peak, but cases are rising as fast as they were falling just two weeks earlier, when self-isolation rules for infected people ended in the UK.
Daily cases are also rising in more than half of the countries in the European Union. They have jumped 48% in the Netherlands. On Tuesday, Germany reported a record high seven-day incidence in Covid-19 cases, of 1,585.4 Covid-19 infections per 100,000 people, days before the government is due to consider easing some restrictions.
In the U.S., the 7-day average is about 31,000, which is far below peaks from last winter. But it really doesn’t matter, does it? Pfizer is already asking the FDA for permission to market a fourth shot for seniors and those most vulnerable to serious disease. It will probably be approved.
But what happens when the next variant comes along and starts infecting those who’ve been vaccinated or who had COVID-19 already? If we’ve learned anything, it’s that those most vulnerable to severe illness should take precautions.
But for everyone else, any attempt to impose further restrictions will likely be ignored. And that may be the most profound political statement ever made in American history.
