An epidemiologist of my acquaintance was in Beijing when Wuhan’s 10 million citizens were confined to quarters. This was her first impression:
I actually find the response by the Chinese government to be extremely interesting. It seems like it’s overblowing the matter on purpose.
Considering the low number of cases (compared to China’s population) and low death rates, it feels like the Chinese government is overblowing fears on purpose, with maps filled with dark areas and shutting down everything everywhere (and this is during China’s most important holiday season).
I suspect it’s practicing for when a Really serious disease breaks out, the sort with people dying like flies.
So I find all this fuss quite interesting. We’ve been warned about a potential superbug outbreak for years, and now we can see how the response will look like.
No doubt the Chinese government is busy taking notes on what it could have done better.
Not to mention, I don’t think most Westerners realize just how big Wuhan is, just how significant Chinese New Year is in terms of people moving around and just how many people go in and out of those wet markets every day. That’s like, tens of thousands of people leaving the wet markets, taking public transport then going home to expose all their visiting relatives, and all those people in turn going to all sorts of crowded areas too.
With a high enough contagion rate, we’d easily be at 1 million infected. The fact that we haven’t reached such numbers means that this virus isn’t That bad.
History
America tested its first, primitive bioweapons on China in 1951, and maybe more since then, and maybe Covid-19 is a weapon. It matters little.
If Covid-19 was a weapon, it ranks with the F-35 fighter, the Zumwalt destroyer, and Trade Tariffs for doing far more damage to us than they could ever inflict on China.
Wherever Covid came from, whether it was a weapon or not, for two months Beijing simultaneously fed 23 million people. And while those people sat home watching TV, Shanghai’s key industries and services kept humming, and Beijing is pouring data about epidemic behavior, communications, logistics, and coordination into a supercomputer and running scenarios to cut the time and disruption of the outbreak in Beijing.
Their demonstration of State competence and social cohesion was so far beyond our imagining that it evoked anger and ridicule from Western critics. But I suspect China’s approach was cheaper in the long run and much more fun.
Gigantic stunts like that are a Chinese specialty, as we saw during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics (produced by Xi Jinping, prior to his elevation to the Dragon Throne).
Godfree wrote Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom, and publishes the newsletter, Here Comes China.
That's very funny - in some ways - and boom, look at the graph. Well done China, and hopefully it will work.