The Pandemic Blog

China is once again undergoing widespread lockdowns, due to many local Covid surges (and their first Covid deaths in many months). The government is doing this despite the widespread unhappiness (to say the least) with this policy – both within China and externally, where the lockdowns will once again needlessly cause shortages of some goods sourced in China. It’s safe to say that nobody is happy with this policy inside or outside of China, and this includes the government. You might wonder why China, where the percentage of people who are fully vaccinated is over 90%, has to do lockdowns at all, while the US, where the percentage of fully vaccinated people is below 70% (and that number drops to below 40% if you just count people who have received all the boosters, including the current one), doesn’t worry about this at all. This is partly because the US, after lots of experience with huge Covid death tolls, clearly considers the current apparent steady-state level of 4-500 deaths ...

I wrote my first post in this blog (it was actually written for my other blog on cybersecurity. When I created this blog, I transferred the 8 or 9 existing posts into it) on Saturday, March 14, 2020. This was immediately after I finally read an article that had been sent to me by a friend 20 hours before. That article had already been read by I believe 20 million or so people, and within a month it had been read by probably a couple hundred million. The article made it clear that it was certain the US already had a lot of Coronavirus cases (the term Covid-19 came later), and they were already growing exponentially . It was already too late for a policy of containment. The only good option was a total lockdown of the country, since at that point nobody knew exactly where the disease had taken hold and where it hadn’t. I thought I’d do a post to warn my friends, then get back to my normal life. Well, the next morning, I looked at the numbers about the pandemic and decided to write...