3 years after Wuhan, China feels the effects of Covid

If you’ve been reading this blog since 2020, you probably know that China was one of my heroes during at least the first year of the pandemic. If you ignore the little fact that it was China’s fault that the pandemic became anywhere near the worldwide disaster it became (which, of course, is hard to ignore. But for the purpose of reading this post, you need to do that), their response was a lot like ours should have been, had we really wanted to protect ourselves as much as possible:

1.      Lock down the affected regions (although by February 2020 the whole USA was affected, so we would have needed a nationwide lockdown for a week or two, with some small exceptions for essential activities).

2.      Close the borders to everybody except returning Americans, who would have to quarantine by themselves in government-paid quarters.

3.      Test everybody and quarantine anyone who was positive (of course, one of the reasons we ended up with the highest per capita Covid death rate was that government bungling of test development and administration made this idea pure fantasy).

4.      Implement rigorous contact tracing, and quarantining anyone who had been exposed to a person who tested positive.

5.      Once new cases had declined to close to zero, start gradually opening up, with lots of protections in place, including masks.

6.      Implement rigorous rules for workplaces, and fine employers that violate them (which OSHA always had the power to do, but somehow under Trump, it never got around to it. Remember the meat packing workers?).

7.      Keep up the quarantining and contact tracing until a highly effective vaccine can be developed and administered to everybody, with only medical exceptions.

The circumstances were different in China, but they essentially followed these steps. However, it turns out they skimped on the last step. They developed a vaccine very quickly (and even offered it for free to a lot of their neighbors). But it turned out to be nowhere near as effective as the new mRNA vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna; and it seems they never even considered buying or making those under contract, although I’m sure they tried to steal the technology. These vaccines were also easily adaptable to new variants, which is why we now have Omicron-specific boosters (and anyone who doesn’t get this shot, and doesn’t have a good reason for not getting it like weakened immune system, is either lazy or an idiot).

For at least a year, until other countries became close-to-fully vaccinated with mRNA vaccines, the Chinese had a great record against Covid (even allowing for some fudging of their numbers). And if you just look at cases and deaths, they’re still doing well. But, to keep those good numbers, they have to resort to draconian lockdowns of whole cities; these may be pushing them toward an actual recession (which they haven’t had since their 1989-1993 recession). Unfortunately, this will possibly push a lot of the rest of us (including the US) into an actual recession, even if China avoids multiple quarters of negative growth.

Of course, this policy has caused a lot of grumbling in China, but Chairman Xi has made it clear he’s not backing off this – although he’ll probably have to at some point. My, how the great have fallen!

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, November 6.

Month	Deaths reported during month/year	Avg. deaths per day during month/year	Deaths as percentage of previous month/year
Month of March 2020	4,058	131
Month of April 2020	59,812	1,994	1,474%
Month of May 2020	42,327	1,365	71%
Month of June 2020	23,925	798	57%
Month of July 2020	26,649	860	111%
Month of August 2020	30,970	999	116%
Month of Sept. 2020	22,809	760	75%
Month of Oct. 2020	24,332	785	107%
Month of Nov. 2020	38,293	1,276	157%
Month of Dec. 2020	79,850	2,576	209%
Total 2020	354,215	1,154
Month of Jan. 2021	98,604	3,181	119%
Month of Feb. 2021	68,918	2,461	70%
Month of March 2021	37,945	1,224	55%
Month of April 2021	24,323	811	64%
Month of May 2021	19,843	661	82%
Month of June 2021	10,544	351	53%
Month of July 2021	8,833	287	84%
Month of August 2021	31,160	1,005	351%
Month of Sept. 2021	56,687	1,890	182%
Month of Oct. 2021	49,992	1,613	88%
Month of Nov. 2021	38,364	1,279	77%
Month of Dec. 2021	41,452	1,337	108%
Total 2021	492,756	1,350	158%
Month of Jan. 2022	65,855	2,124	159%
Month of Feb. 2022	63,451	2,266	96%
Month of March 2022	31,427	1,014	50%
Month of April 2022	13,297	443	42%
Month of May 2022	11,474	370	86%
Month of June 2022	11,109	370	97%
Month of July 2022	11,903	384	107%
Month of August 2022	16,199	540	136%
Month of September 2022	13,074	436	81%
Month of October 2022	12,399	400	95%
Total Pandemic so far	1,098,235	1,121

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,098,235

Average daily deaths last seven days: 433

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 322

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.3%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 99,647,812             

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 301,885 (43,126/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 258,379 (36,911/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 0.3% (0.3% last week)

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.