(note: while WSWS (trot site) uses CCP instead of CPC, they generally have good takes on China and support China against US imperialism)
(note: to clarify, this article is in support of Zero-COVID and sees the lifting of the policy as a grave mistake)
(note: i do not necessarily support all the shit wsws says i am not a fucking trot)
It's sad but inevitable. China simply can't carry on zero covid when the entire rest of the world has given it up. It's untenable, makes tourism to China impossible, and means any Chinese wanting to leave and come back have to go through a ridiculous procedure. Daily life is annoying, having to get covid tests every other day just to ride the metro and enter restaurants, it's poorly implemented where different regions have totally different apps and procedures, and feels unfair when the entire rest of the world has nothing like this. China won, but the world failed. If everybody did what China did, covid would be gone, but they didn't and the CPC has to adjust to the conditions of the world at large or risk losing their mandate amongst average Chinese folks. I can only hope the slow repealing of zero covid is done well, that the elderly are vaccinated in much higher numbers than they are now, and that the medical system is ready for an influx. I really don't know what else the CPC is expected to do; they've done the utmost for almost three years, but that cannot be the permanent state of affairs.
I guess the Chinese people will have to reconsider when their grandpa's in the ICU and their whole family is sick because their kid brought home a case from school. I hope that they will protest this change of policy from prioritizing human life over profit to prioritizing profit over human life before millions are permanently disabled from Long COVID.
Here in Canada, we are facing a "triple-threat" from COVID, the Flu, and RSV. Shelves are being stripped clean of medicine and people's kids are in the hospital from RSV. I personally know someone whose kid is in the hospital from contracting COVID and RSV simultaneously.
I really hope that the Chinese government will reconsider. I have family in China, and I really don't want my grandpa to die from COVID just after fighting cancer and winning.
why are you assuming the Chinese government will throw open the plague gates the same way America and Canada has?
“Wind down zero covid” does not mean doing nothing like most countries in the imperial core have resulted to.
I assumed wrongly that it would be a complete pro-COVID policy. I am reassured that the new COVID policy in China is not comparable to the pro-COVID policies of the West.
It is very easy to understand why you would feel that way. The West’s approach to covid has been truly been “pro-Covid” and it is horrifying.
Whether they trow them oplen or opnen them slowly. At the end they are open
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Not really. Even now if the west wanted thet could do a 4 weeks close down and covid wold be done. Either way you need a 4 week closedown to fix things.
The difference is psycological. In that if you se a slow increase in death rates youe are not as shoked as when there is a sudden death glut. Wich is what moved western hoverments to action in 2020. The corpse cart going down the street looks really bad. Even if you are in a neoliberal hellhole.
There's some logic to states just trying to power through the annual COVID+flu season with the increased incidence of symptomatic RSV. Unfortunately this was always inevitable once SARS-COV-2 wasn't contained immediately and countries tried half-assed "rolling lockdowns" in totally uncoordinated and ineffectual manners. I think most immunologists would have expected this? I'm only in a tangentially related field and I figured the cold & flu season closest to COVID restrictions ending in different places would be worse than the initial and more recent COVID waves, Delta excluded. People around other people are constantly exposed to relatively harmless pathogens, and occasionally to pathogens their immune system doesn't already know or which are significantly different from the versions they encountered but still close enough to trigger that outdated memory to try to fight it. That constant exposure has been pretty consistent throughout human history, eg telecommunications and mass extended quarantine/isolation is pretty rare historically.
Eventually a lot of people were going to return to the more traditional modes and frequencies of person-to-person interaction, just with their immune systems being less primed. Children and the aged would be at-risk subsequent to mass, extended isolation. The aged were already by far the most at-risk of death or debilitating symptoms of COVID so they were just super screwed.
I don't imagine there will be a real rollback of rescinding COVID restrictions anywhere. Maybe some cities will try, I'm sure people wearing masks is here to stay in plenty of urban areas and probably more of SE Asia. CPC tried, valiantly, and they did save a ton of lives during that initial outbreak. They could have rest on their laurels then and done basically nothing about Omicron, but they kept trying. At the end of the day though, a majority of people are healthy enough to be comfortable taking their chances. The odds they will be personally affected are pretty low. And they have the elbow room to be more cautious/isolate periodically when they know they'll be interacting with at-risk family in the near future. Everyone without that latitude is worse off.
The hypothesis of that flu season is worse bc of lack of what you describing doesn't really hold up. Most of the western world wasn't wasn't under stringent covid procedures last flu season. I think a more likely hypothesis is that on a population level immune systems were weakened by mass COVID infection we have seen with omicron/whatever the new hotness is.