In 2020, authoritarian China led the way in imposting lockdowns that had always been rejected in past efforts to control pandemics.
Neil Ferguson, the Mad Modeler whose predictions of doom helped lead first Britain and then the U.S. into lockdown, has admitted the role China played. “If China had not done it,” he told the London Times, “the year would have been very different.”
Now China is the Poster Boy for why its policy of Zero Covid doesn’t work. A total of 51 million people – and climbing – are now in severe lockdown over surging COVID cases. The tech hub of Shenzhen and its port of Yantian – which processes 90 percent of China’s electronics shipments, the fourth largest in the world – are in danger of closing down. That would cause dramatic shipping delays and further harm supply chains. “It’s going to be really bad,” Daniel Stanton, the author of Supply Chain Management For Dummies, told Fortune.
China has maintained a strict ‘zero-Covid’ policy enforced by swift lockdowns, travel restrictions and mass testing whenever cases have emerged. Now it looks like China only delayed the onset of COVID surges and is now in danger of damaging both its economy and trade routes that supply the entire world.
https://fortune.com/2022/03/
As a reminder, this is China’s official COVID death tally. It’s unclear how much longer they can maintain this increasingly absurd fiction.
