By December 2022, the entire industrialized world had moved beyond COVID-19 restrictions and had reopened — except China.
Under China’s “zero COVID” policy, just a few positive tests for COVID-19 in a designated area meant that millions of people would be locked away in their homes, forbidden to go to work or shop for food. While the policy no doubt worked to some degree to keep the number of infections down, the people became rebellious and the economy went into freefall.
How many infections there were and how many died in the first phase of the pandemic will probably never be known. But once China gave up on zero COVID in December 2022, the results were catastrophic and showed what a colossal mistake President Xi Jinping made in instituting such a draconian policy.
For three years, Chinese society had been myopically focused on eradicating the virus. No clear exit strategy existed. China was not expected to emerge from Zero-Covid purgatory for the foreseeable future. Reopening came suddenly, with no preparation. This led to the biggest Covid-19 outbreak the world had ever seen: 250 million infections during the first twenty days of December alone. (As this figure was supplied by the chronically unreliable Communist Party, we may wish to revise it upward.)
Xi’s beloved lockdown policy had helped create a nation largely unprotected by natural immunity: “more vulnerable,” writes academic Yanzhong Huang, “than almost any other population on Earth.” Poor natural immunity, low vaccination rates, the mid-winter cold—these were the ripe circumstances into which SARS-CoV-2 was suddenly released. Faced with none of the usual obstacles, the virus was able to tear through China. On the ground, reporters found chaotic scenes. No surge capacity measures had been implemented at hospitals, because no warnings had been given. Emergency rooms were overwhelmed, patients sprawled on floors, ambulances were turned away.
China was a petri dish for the virus. It was something akin to Native American populations being exposed to smallpox, mumps, measles, and other common diseases in European white people. Europe had dealt with outbreaks of these diseases before, giving most people a “natural immunity,” which didn’t prevent infection but which created antibodies to lessen the severity of the disease.
No such natural immunity was given to the Chinese. While wave after wave of infections swept across Europe and North America, China was “spared” those outbreaks. When the zero COVID policy was lifted, the virus raged across China at an unbelievable rate.
In early December, The Economist modeled a peak of 45 million infections per day, producing an expected death toll of 680,000 if the virus were left unchecked. Within weeks, as The Economist added additional information to its model, this was scaled up to 1.5 million. Separate academic teams at universities in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and the United States all reached their own estimates of between 1 million and 1.6 million. And Wu Zunyou, the CCDC’s chief epidemiologist, said that 80% of the population (1.13 billion people) were infected in the period between December 7 and January 21. Wu’s own estimated case fatality ratio for the winter fell between 0.09% and 0.16%, giving us a total of one million deaths—at a minimum.
Not surprisingly, the Chinese Communists have declared “victory” over COVID-19.
In the face of this series of catastrophes—a years-long clampdown on civil liberties on a national scale, followed by a blistering Covid wave—the CCP has responded by… declaring victory. At a recent meeting, the Central Committee of the Communist Party announced: “China has achieved a major and decisive victory in its Covid-19 prevention and control since November 2022… China has created a miracle in human history.”
The consequence of this is that China has learned nothing.
Three years on, the CCP is the same catastrophic mix of secrecy, paranoia, huge power, and huge incompetence. There were many lessons that could have been learned from Covid—the need for transparency predominant among them. The CCP took in none of those. Instead, China is back to where it started with the first Covid wave: obfuscation and a death toll that we can only guess at.
A million dead in two months because the regime’s first instinct when the pandemic first hit was to take away people’s freedom. That was the first instinct of our government. Thankfully, many were able to resist.
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