Hope you like reading. Get that literacy rate up ;)
Starting around mid-November, the Chinese Communist Party has begun a gradual draw away from their Zero-Covid policy, which they have maintained since the start of the Pandemic and has kept their case and death numbers to staunch lows for such a large and densly-populated country.
Although there are still measures in place to keep the virus in check, the harshest methods, such as lockdowns, are slowly being relaxed, in the name of the Chinese Economy, which has taken a beating during the past couple of years, and other than that have zero base in science, and are a pure political move on the heels of Xi Jinping's third reelection as the General Secretary of the CCP. His idea of "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" is a play on "Socialism in One Country", imposed by Joseph Stalin in the USSR as blatant treason of the Bolshevik and Marxist ideals, and is a direct result of Chinese Capitalism, and the simple fact that China cannot separate itself from the global market entirely, and is now having to slowly bow to it.
The replacement policy is a sort of "20-Measures" policy, a bankrupt system of lifting Zero-Covid, while only partially preparing for a potential surge. These include shorter quarantines and travel restrictions, as well as the end of secondary-contact tracing, while having hospitals and stockpiled medicine on standby should things take a turn for the worst. The major news source Reuters has reported multiple Chinese cities having ended regular testing.
Coincidently, these measures were put in place just days before the G20 summit between Xi Jinping and President Biden of the United States. America, along with the rest of the Western World, has been repeatedly pressing for China to tear down Zero-Covid in one fell swoop, a move that would mean disaster for the country, especially in places where there are still low rates of vaccination. For example, in Shanghai, China's most populated city, only 71 percent of elderly people above 60 years old have been vaccinated, so removing Zero-Covid suddenly would put all of these people at risk (And don't use "natural immunity" as a rebuttal; it's created as a scapegoat excuse to cover up mass infection and reinfection to justify letting Covid go crazy).
The Free World's method of letting the virus run wild has led to, let's see...
- Constant surges of infections, and the resulting +6 million DIRECT deaths (See bold for estimated excess total), 1 million of which are in the U.S. alone, though these surges aren't known the public because of the abandoning of case reporting by all major sources. Some minor ones are doing their best.
- Since the start of the pandemic, the US has recorded nearly 100 million official COVID-19 infections and the cumulative death toll is approaching 1.1 million. An estimated 20 million Americans are now suffering from Long COVID, including up to 4 million so profoundly disabled that they are no longer able to work. Worldwide, an estimated over 20 million people have died directly or indirectly from COVID-19, according to the excess deaths tracker by The Economist. On the other hand, the Zero-COVID policy in China has limited the toll of the pandemic in the country to 1.12 million infections and 5,226 deaths thus far. The last death occurred on May 26 (Not counting the past weeks), shortly after the virus was eliminated in Shanghai through stringent lockdowns, mass testing, contact tracing, and other public health measures.
- The sudden hatred for any method of protection from disease as "anti-freedom" has led to a surge in other respiratory illness, such as Influenza and RSV, in a healthcare system already stretched to the breaking point by Covid still prancing about. Compare that to 2020, when the methods imposed against Covid put these same illnesses to near eradication for the year:
- ...With approximately an average of 8 people per 100,000 population being placed in hospitals, children under the age of five are only behind adults 65 and older at 13.6 per 100,000, nearly twice the American national average. Many in the corporate press had claimed this was a result of a so-called “immunity-debt” that left many children vulnerable because they had gone two years with essentially no exposure to these respiratory pathogens. Such pseudo-scientific explanations facilitate the current back-to-school policies heavily promoted by the Democratic Party. The claim is that such infections have clinical benefits to children, meaning that the limited measures against COVID that saved millions of lives were somehow harmful to children. In actuality, COVID has killed far more children than flu and RSV, despite very limited mitigation measures. Immunology professor at the University of Surrey Deborah Dunn-Walters told the Financial Times, “Immunity debt as an individual concept is not recognized in immunology. The immune system is not viewed as a muscle that has to be used all the time to be kept in shape and, if anything, the opposite is the case.”
- The American healthcare system is also experiencing a labor shortage crisis. Nurses aren’t leaving the bedside because they are disinterested in their professions. Rather, the conditions under which they are forced to work, their unmet concerns over patient safety, the monetization of health care, are deeply troubling, creating hardships and chronic distress for them and their profession. Worse, they are being scapegoated for the errors and safety violations that are inherent to the dangerous conditions created by demands by hospital systems to operate under the principle of doing more with less. The crisis in health care will continue to grow more appalling as economic realities—labor costs, supply chain issues, and inflation—continue to erode the capacity of health systems to deliver care to their patient populations. A recent report in Fierce Healthcare noted that upwards of 60 percent of hospitals across the country will end 2022 “with their operations in the red versus the 34 percent reported in 2019.” The projections were made by Kaufman Hall on behalf of the American Hospital Associations.
I could go on for ages, but enough wasting your time, considering you took the time to get here. The fact is, Zero-Covid CAN WORK, but only when implemented on an international scale. China's attempts at keeping it in their one country worked for a bit, but the innate nature of global Capitalism means they cannot keep it forever, or their economy will founder.
You may have heard of the mass protests breaking out across China. Naturally, Western media, including the BBC, the Guardian and Reuters, jumped at the opportunity of demonizing one of the West's major rivals by deliberately muddy the waters by falsely implying that workers were protesting measures to suppress COVID-19 infections. Asking the workers themselves at Chinese factories, however, reveals that the unrest is over the EXACT OPPOSITE, and that rather they are concerned the new policies make them more exposed to the virus. The workers clashed with large contingents of police as they protested over unpaid bonuses and poor working and living conditions. Workers also expressed concerns that they were being forced to work alongside and live in dormitories with others who were potentially infected with COVID-19.
In response to a COVID-19 outbreak in October, Foxconn, the company that produces the Apple iPhone that we in the West take as a common possession, initially sought to ignore the infections then imposed a so-called closed-loop system aimed at keeping production going. The entire workforce was confined to the massive plant owned by the company that produces around half of all iPhones for the world, and infected workers forced to remain in their dormitories. Under pressure from Apple to boost production of the new iPhone 14 model in time for the Christmas shopping season in the US and internationally, Foxconn, in league with local government, launched a mass recruitment campaign with promises of pay and bonuses to hire 100,000 new workers. The protests apparently centered among these new recruits, angry that the promised pay and bonuses had not been received.
Of course, censorship by the CCP has left exact details of the events and opinions rather rare and malleable, but the nature of the protests is clear if one looks deep enough. The What’s on Weibo website that monitors Chinese language social media reported that a clear majority of the people speaking out on social media support the Foxconn workers. It explained: “They post old propaganda posters that emphasize how the Chinese working class will lead the revolution, and recommend other Weibo users to read Karl Marx”.
It seems that if anything, the repression by the CCP is only leading the Chinese workers back to their roots in the Chinese Civil War, that saw the rise of Mao Zedong, admittedly a Stalinist dictator himself. The good point here is that the workers aren't turning to Western "democracy" for answers, but rather to the forgotten history of the ideology their state falsely portrays itself as being of. The Chinese are in favor of Zero-Covid because they have seen that it is effective, but they are aware of the problems such as the lack of food and provisions. Workers in Western society are also aware that Zero-Covid is effective, and a growing conscience is forming that it can only be achieved on a global scale.
In summary, hoping you took the time to read this all, Zero-Covid is not fun, never was, and never will be. That doesn't mean that it is bad. In fact, it stands to be the best method for combatting the virus, and putting a final and true stop to its rampage, a step towards actually getting back our normality, rather than living in a new normal constantly plagued by the presence of the virus.
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