A Zero-Covid story

The Chinese government may finally be coming to its senses and rethinking its Zero Covid policy. While that made sense in Wuhan in January 2020, it ceased to make sense when much more transmissible variants had replaced the original one, and completely eradicating the virus became impossible. Now the Chinese population has clearly decided that the massive disruptions to their lives caused by lockdowns are unacceptable, even compared to the risk of more illness and deaths.

Other countries tried Zero Covid, too, and backed off it – although also only after causing a lot of suffering that was ultimately for naught. I’m thinking of Vietnam, where my wife has been for the last three years, after she went there to care for her father while her mother was in the hospital, then got caught there when Covid broke out worldwide.

She’s still in Vietnam because USCIS, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the facts that her father was dying and the pandemic was still raging in Vietnam didn’t justify her inability to come back for a mandatory interview on renewal of her green card. Rather than postpone the interview as her lawyer requested, they cancelled the renewal process with no possibility of appeal, leaving her unable to return to the US legally. I’m now pursuing an application for Humanitarian Parole to at least get her back in the US, so she can go before an immigration judge, who will hopefully talk some sense into USCIS.

Like China (and other Asian countries like Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and Japan), Vietnam’s initial response to the pandemic, including locking down areas when there was just one instance of transmission of the virus, was very successful. Up until at least March of 2021, there had been only 35 Covid deaths in Vietnam since the beginning of the pandemic.

But then the Delta variant hit in April 2021, and Vietnam’s deaths numbers quickly went into the tens of thousands (the number is now at 43,000, which is a lot more than 35. But per capita, it’s still light years ahead of the US level of deaths). So, in some areas – one of which is where my wife lives – total lockdowns were imposed. In her area, that lockdown lasted 15 months. Nobody could leave their house, period. My wife once got fined $500 for taking the 15-minute walk to her parents’ house.

But one experience she had really brought home to me how destructive a lockdown could be. A friend of hers, who is a single mom of a 6-year-old girl, caught Covid and had to go into mandatory quarantine (at a sparse government-run facility where she had to pay $50 a day for the privilege of being incarcerated. $50 is more than the average Vietnamese person earns in a week). She had to go immediately – the police came to her house and drove her to the facility.

But here’s the kicker: They were in such a hurry to take her away, that they wouldn’t even let her make any provisions for her daughter while she was gone. So, this poor little girl was left alone in her house. When my wife heard about this from her friend, she immediately contacted the police to ask if she could go to the house – which is just about two miles from where my wife lives – to pick up the girl and bring her back to stay with her until her mother was out of quarantine.

However, she was refused. And if she’d tried to go pick the girl up, she would have been fined and perhaps jailed, since this would be her second offense. The bottom line: The girl would have been in the house by herself for the entire time that her mother was in quarantine (which turned out to be around ten days, if memory serves me well), had Bich not been able to find a neighbor who was willing to walk over at night and bring the girl to her house – and she would have also been fined if she’d been caught.

But that didn’t happen until the girl had been in the house by herself for five or six days! Who is making the calculation that it’s better to leave a 6-year-old girl by herself for potentially a full 14-day quarantine period, than it is to allow her mother to take the girl to live with somebody else while she’s gone, before she gets dragged away into quarantine?

And that’s the problem with the Zero Covid policy: it imposes risks on people that in many cases far outweigh the Covid risk itself. It took the deaths of about ten people in an apartment building in Urumqi to bring that message home in China. And it might well have taken the death of a six-year-old girl to do the same in Vietnam.

NOTE from Tom: I'm not suggesting that the actions of the police in this incident reflect a policy of the Vietnamese government. It was probably just an over-zealous interpretation of their mandate by one or two individual police officers. My wife didn't try to appeal this action to the local or provincial level. Her focus was simply getting the girl to a safe place, which fortunately happened, although belatedly.

The numbers

These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for Sunday, November 27.

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	1,104,798	1,111

 

I. Total deaths (as of Sunday)

Total US reported Covid deaths as of Sunday:          1,104,798

Average daily deaths last seven days: 304

Average daily deaths previous seven days: 363

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 0.2%

II. Total reported cases (as of Sunday)

Total US reported cases as of Sunday: 100,494,092          

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 284,991 (40,713/day)

Increase in reported cases previous 7 days: 310,634 (44,376)

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.