Back in November I wrote that China’s Zero Covid policy was the right thing done the wrong way. Briefly after, consequent to some protests against Zero-Covid, China basically abandoned the policy.
The main problem is the same that exists in almost every country: even the most competent elites in the world today are, when not graded on a scale, incompetent buffoons incapable of running anything properly. Zero-Covid should have been about making necessary infrastructure changes to clean air so that over time restrictions could be eased.
This does not mean Zero-Covid did not have benefits: by shifting the oncoming wave downstream, China has significantly decreased mortality. Current protocols mean that Covid is much less deadly than if they’d given up early. A lot more people are vaccinated and the protocols for treating Covid are much better than earlier.
But massive public health measures should have been an opportunity, again, for improving infrastructure.
In the short term I would suggest that this will cause a supply shock, not make one less likely. If you need things made in China, stock up with a two to three month supply.
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There will obviously be a wave of hospitalizations in China. Their hospital capacity per capita is much lower than most of the West’s. They do have the ability build temporary hospitals fast, but the choke-point isn’t facilities, it is trained staff. The CCP has plenty of warm bodies they can throw at low skill hospital jobs, but no great surplus of doctors and nurses.
The longer term consequence is the same as the longer-term consequence in the West. The best reason to do Zero-Covid was never about short term deaths, it was about avoiding Long Covid and a population which gets infected over and over again by a virus which screws up immune systems and damages organs, including the brain. The population level effects of Long Covid will be massive. The UK and US already have about 2% of their workforce disabled because of it.
China is a decade out from the start of a demographic crisis, with an aging workforce. Their dependency ration (the number of people working / number of people not working but who must be supported) will rise and keep rising.
Long Covid will have a devastating effect on the population. There is no particular reason to expect Covid to miraculously disappear. We’ve had chronic serious diseases that lasted for centuries or millennia and the damage Long Covid does is not a serious enough evolutionary disadvantage for there to be significant pressure for its reduction. Indeed, if, as seems to be the case, much of it is related to the immune dis-regulation, it’s likely to be selected for.
China’s elites policy was the right one, but public health measures at massive scale are what you do to buy time to clean up the water/air/find a cure. Since no cure has been found for Covid, and there is no cure on the horizon, well, infrastructure needed to be changed.
China isn’t worse about this than most other places. There has been no mass refitting of ventilation infrastructure in almost any major country (Japan seems to be a partial exception).
But it is tragic to see incompetence and short-sightedness destroy the last major uninfected pool of people in the post-Covid world.
China will pay a grave price for this, and Western triumphalism at the end of Zero-Covid is like cheering when the last stronghold falls to an invader. “It was so embarassing that they were holding out when we surrendered so easily.”
Pathetic and sad.