Those concerned about the rapid spread of COVID-19 across China will be happy to hear that Chinese officials are reporting the storm is over. As Bloomberg reports, the top official in charge of tracking the spread of the disease says new infections have fallen to a “relatively low” level just in time for the Lunar New Years celebrations. According to former Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, things in China are “stable and orderly” with new cases and hospitalizations on a steady decline.
From the beginning, when COVID-19 first emerged in what now seems to be two separate outbreaks around the “wet market” in Wuhan, China, there have been reasons to be skeptical about the numbers coming from the Chinese government. However, nothing in the past may compare to the horrific scale of the misreporting going on at this moment.
As NPR reports, China has dropped almost all regulations around COVID-19. No more quarantine. No more required tests. No rules to stop someone from traveling even if they are visibly sick. The holiday season is happening amid a disease surge that may have infected 1 billion people in the last month, and is currently taking an estimated 33,000 lives each day.
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The Chinese government responded to the original outbreaks in Wuhan with a coverup, then with genuinely draconian measures to prevent the spread of disease. For many, the images of families being torn apart, military forces walking around in hazard suits, and thousands being forced into quarantine facilities was at least as frightening as the prospect of any disease.
Scary as they were, the thing about those draconian measures is … they appeared to work. After hitting over 75,000 cases by Feb. 20, 2020, China didn’t top 100,000 until December 2021. By then there had been over 50 million recorded cases in the United States.
However, if the numbers reported are even close to accurate, the measures that China took to arrest the spread of that first outbreak came in very different circumstances. Originally, the average number of cases of COVID-19 resulting from transmission from a single infected individual (a value usually abbreviated as R0) was somewhere very close to 2.0—a value that made the disease about as transmissible as flu. By the summer of 2021, the R0 of the delta variant was estimated at 5.08. In September of 2022, the BA.5 subvariant of the omicron strain was given an estimated R0 of 18.6. That put it in competition with measles for the title of “most communicable disease ever measured.”
The steps that China took to fight a disease with an R0 of 2 are utterly unsuited to a disease with an R0 of 19. In trying to maintain a “zero COVID” policy with those measures, China was fighting an endless battle, and that battle failed for the same reasons many do: logistics. A hyper-capitalist authoritarian regime that had systematically removed social safety nets in order to drive people into cities and factories seemed to have no plans for how to sustain those people when the factories were closed and the cities under lockdown.
By spring 2022, the dam China had erected began to leak, requiring even larger shutdowns and more onerous measures as cases doubled over the course of a month. Throughout the summer of 2022, holding back COVID-19 became an obsession that was literally imprisoning millions in their homes and generating social unrest that represented a genuine threat to the Chinese government.
In November, the dam burst.
It’s clear that Chinese officials felt themselves trapped between two immutable forces. On the one hand, the level of restrictions being applied made life intolerable for Chinese citizens across huge areas. So intolerable they were willing to risk disease, imprisonment, and even harsher consequences to protest. There were even accounts of people facing starvation in their own homes due to their inability to go out and buy food. On the other hand, their own policies insisted on ever harsher restrictions.
When the possibility of unrest broke those policies, the Chinese government appeared to have no backup plan. It just metaphorically threw up its hands and surrendered.
By the end of the year, NPR reported that China was seeing an estimated 10 million new cases of COVID-19 each day. That’s enough to more than lap the U.S., which previously lead the world in COVID cases, every couple of weeks.
On Jan. 12, China announced that 54,000 people had died of COVID-19 in the first month since restrictions had been dropped, 5,300 of them from respiratory failure. That number came after China reported just 37 deaths from respiratory failure due to COVID-19 in December. Neither of those numbers is believable. But the the two orders’ of magnitude difference does appear to reflect how COVID-19 is now moving like a blast wave through China.
Even as officials are claiming that things are now peachy, Reuters reports estimates that deaths per day could hit 36,000 next week. That’s over 1 million people a month. It’s also trillions of new opportunities for COVID-19 to turn the crank again and produce a new, more transmissible variant that absolutely is not guaranteed to be less deadly that previous variants.
Meanwhile, CNN reports that both Japan and South Korea are seeing genuinely lower rates of COVID-19. Hopefully, it will stay that way.
CDC COVID-19 Data Tracker as of Jan. 20.
New cases verified in the U.S. per day: 47,458
Daily Hospitalizations due to COVID-19 in the U.S.: 4,860
Daily deaths due to COVID-19 in the U.S.: 565
Roughly 1 in 10 new cases of COVID-19 still results in hospitalization.
The rate of deaths stands at 1.1%.
The United States hit a peak rate of daily deaths from COVID-19 at 3,341 in January of 2021.
Only 15.5% of the American population has been vaccinated with bivariant vaccine.
Wear a mask. Keep your vaccinations up to date.