A slightly different take on what China is doing. Earlier:
"Epic Tightrope Walk Faces PBOC As China Exits Covid"
The author of this piece, Gordon Chang is very anti-communist and has been forecasting the fall of the communist empire for as long as I've been aware of him, twenty-or-so years, and his writing should probably be read with his goal/bias in mind.
From 19FortyFive, December 11:
Perhaps as many as 90% of China’s 1.41 billion people will come down with COVID-19, said Feng Zijian, former deputy chief of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to Bloomberg News. Feng predicts 60% of the population will be infected in the first wave.
China did not have to wait long. There is now a fast-moving wave ripping through Beijing.
The capital city was not prepared. “We have a child with a high fever but all the pharmacies are out of ibuprofen,” said a Beijing resident surnamed Lin to the Financial Times. “It came too fast, we didn’t have time to prepare.” Shortages are widespread. “Beijing is running out of medical supplies,” the London paper notes.
The situation is so bad, Peking University’s Michael Pettis reports on Twitter, that Beijingers are thinking of deliberately exposing themselves to the disease, so they won’t get it later when the public health care system has completely broken down.
There are also outbreaks across the country, including in Guangzhou, the capital of southern Guangdong province, the country’s factory floor. Some are calling the nationwide situation China’s “nuclear winter.” During the winter, the forecast is one million Covid deaths. Some estimate the toll could reach 2.1 million.
The Communist Party, as a result, faces one of its most severe tests ever.
The CCP, as the ruling organization is known, has no one to blame for its regime-threatening predicament. From the beginning of the pandemic, it made its control of disease a test of its legitimacy, boasting that its ability to deal with the coronavirus was proof of the superiority of Chinese communism over democracy in general and American democracy in particular.
Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, to prove his case, adopted a “dynamic zero-Covid” policy, perhaps the most draconian set of disease control-measures in the world.
For instance, whole city districts were locked down over the presence of a single infection. People were tested multiple times a day.
The emphasis on isolation deprived the Chinese central government of the resources to build, among other things, ICUs and general hospital beds. The government did build—and appears to be still building—massive quarantine facilities, like a 250,000-bed location in Guangzhou....
....MUCH MORE
