China does everything to fight Covid except for what’s most needed

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 a day to be quite acceptable, whereas China, which had gone about five months without a single Covid death, regards any level of deaths to be unacceptable.

And since a large majority of people who die from Covid in the US are unvaccinated, the fact that so many unvaccinated people continue to die is of course a cause for concern, but clearly isn’t a concern for the people who stubbornly refuse to get vaccinated (even though almost all of the politicians and journalists that keep questioning the need for, and safety of, vaccines are without doubt fully vaccinated – e.g., almost as soon as vaccines became available in the US, Fox News required everyone who sets foot in their headquarters to be fully vaccinated).

There are two main reasons why China is sticking with its zero-Covid policy:

1.      There are far too few critical-care beds per capita than in a country like the US. To be honest, this is hard to understand. Sure, it would be expensive to increase them. But the costs of the lockdowns undoubtedly far exceed the cost of doing so – plus the country would then be much better prepared for other natural disasters like another pandemic or earthquakes.

2.      The home-grown Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines are much less effective than the Western mRNA vaccines, including Pfizer and Moderna. So the 90% vaccination rate has led to a much lower rate of immunity than the vaccines in the West (plus, I don’t believe they’re offering booster doses, meaning that anyone who was vaccinated a year or more ago may be effectively unvaccinated).

The second reason is understandable, but for the wrong reasons. It’s simply misplaced national pride that makes the government refuse to accept the Western vaccines, although my guess is the pride is confined to the government and if given the choice, the people would be happy to receive the mRNA vaccines, especially if doing so would end the lockdowns. This goes to show why autocratic governments inevitably end up making decisions that cost their compatriots dearly (see A. Hitler, Unnecessary decision to declare war on the US; V. Putin, Disastrous decision to invade Ukraine; D. Trump, Largely successful attempts to control news about the spread of the novel Coronavirus; etc.).

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, November 20.

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	1,100,127	1,115

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,100,127

Average daily deaths last seven days: 424

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 433

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: 99,898,467             

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 388,020 (55,431)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 301,885 (43,126/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.