By John Walsh
June 29, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--
In May and June two milestones were
passed in the world's battle with Covid-19
and were widely noted in the press, one in
the US and one in China. They invite a
comparison between the two countries and
their approach to combating the pandemic.
The first milestone was passed on May 12
when the United States registered more than
1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June
19, 2022 , when this article was written)
due to Covid, the highest of any country in
the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in
a piece headlined:“US Covid Deaths Hit 1
Million: 'History Should Judge Us.'”
Second, on June 1, China emerged from its
60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to
an outbreak there, the most serious since
the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the
pandemic. The total number of deaths in
mainland China since the beginning of the
epidemic in January 2020 now stands at 5.226
as of June 19, 2022 .
To put that in perspective, that is 3,042
deaths per million population in the US
versus 3.7 deaths in China due to
Covid: 3,042 vs 3.7! Had China followed the
same course as the US, it would have
experienced at least 4 million deaths. Had
the US followed China's course it would have
had only 1,306 deaths total.
The European Union did not fare not much
better than the US. with 2,434 deaths per
million as of June 19.
When confronted with these numbers, the
response of the Western media has all too
often been denial that China's numbers were
valid. But China's data have been backed by
counts of excess deaths during the period of
the pandemic, as The New York Times
illustrated in a recent article .
Actually this is old news. The validity
of China's numbers, as shown by counts of
excess deaths, was validated long ago in a
February 2021 study by a group at Oxford
University and the Chinese Center for
Disease Control and Prevention. This was
published in the prestigious British Medical
Journal and is discussed in detail here .
What about the economy?
Clearly China put the saving of lives
above the advance of the economy with
its“dynamic zero-Covid policy.” But contrary
to what was believed in the West at the
time, saving lives also turned out to be
better for the economy, as shown in the
following data from the World Bank :
During the first year of the pandemic,
2020, China's economy continued to grow,
albeit at a slower rate. In contrast, the US
economy contracted dramatically, dropping
all the way back not simply to 2019 levels,
but to pre-2018 levels.
Interestingly, the plot also shows the
year that the Chinese GDP based on
purchasing power parity (PPP) surpassed that
of the United States in 2017, heralding a
new era for the Global South.
The World Bank has not yet released data
for 2021, but the International Monetary
Fund has PPP-GDP data for 2021, shown here
. The US economy grew at 5.97% and China's
at 8.02%.
Unlike the World Bank data shown in the
graph above for the years up to 2020, these
data for 2021 are not corrected for
inflation, which for 2021 ran at 4.7% in the
US, whereas China's was 0.85% . So China's
growth would be even greater in comparison
to the US, were inflation taken into
account.
The bottom line is that for the first two
years of the pandemic through 2021, China's
growth was always positive and greater than
that of the US. China's policy not only
saved lives but protected the economy.
Win-win, one might say.
Is China's dynamic zero Covid
policy“sustainable”in the face of the
Omicron variant?
The Shanghai lockdown
The period of the recent Shanghai
lockdown, which we can date from April 1,
2022, ended on June 1, and followed the
second-largest outbreak in China since the
original outbreak in January 2020 in
Wuhan. Each resulted in major lockdowns; the
first in Wuhan lasted about 76 days and the
second in Shanghai about 60 days. The first
in Wuhan was due to the original variant and
the second was due to the much more
infectious Omicron.
During the recent lockdown in Shanghai,
the Western press was awash with
proclamations, all too many laced with an
unseemly Schadenfreude, that China's dynamic
zero-Covid policy was not sustainable.
This is all too reminiscent of decades of
predictions that China's extraordinary
success in developing its economy to number
one in the world in terms of PPP-GDP was a
passing phase, a Ponzi scheme that was –
what else –“not sustainable.”
Recently the same press has gone silent,
always a sign that China has met with
success. So what are the results?
The Shanghai lockdown ended on June 1 and
from that day until the day of this writing,
June 19, there have been no deaths due to
Covid on the Chinese mainland. Cases
nationwide are also way down to 183 per day
from the peak of 26,000 on April 15. That
was the largest number of cases in a single
day for the entire period of the pandemic in
China. For comparison, the peak in the US
was 800,000 in a single day.
Both the Wuhan and Shanghai lockdowns
demanded sacrifices and patience over the
roughly two-month period for each. However,
these difficulties are generally exaggerated
in the West and based on anecdotes of the
worst of the difficulties encountered. Such
sordid journalism reached rock bottom in a
New York Times piece equating China's
hard-working health-care workers to Adolf
Eichmann.
As an antidote to this kind of hit piece
and to gain a feeling of life in the cities
that were under lockdown during the Wuhan
outbreak, Peter Hessler's March 2020 account
in The New Yorker,“Life on Lockdown in
China” is enlightening and will dispel many
misconceptions. Hessler was living and
teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, at the time.
For the moment China's approach has
succeeded, although we cannot say what the
future holds. But the public health measures
that have worked so well in mainland China
should not be lightly dismissed let alone be
the subject of mean-spirited attacks. Such
measures may be a means of saving millions
of lives when the next variant or the next
pandemic strikes.
US needs a people's tribunal
Turning again to the US, what does it say
when one of the richest nations in the
world, spending more than $1 trillion a year
on its“national security” budget, could not
muster the means to deal with Covid-19 and
ended up with more deaths than any other
nation on Earth? China's handling of the
pandemic certainly shows a completely
different outcome was possible. The US death
toll was not an inescapable act of nature.
That being so, should there not be a
people's gribunal to investigate those in
charge in the US government over the course
of three administrations? That that, and not
an official whitewash, is certainly
needed? And should not punishment
appropriate for a crime against humanity be
meted out? The 1 million dead deserve no
less.