The Pandemic Blog

We’re learning more and more each day about why Xi Jinping was so reluctant to relax the Zero Covid policy: he knew there would be a deluge of Covid cases and deaths as soon as he did that. And while it’s still early, it looks like both Covid cases and deaths are growing rapidly. The problem with the Zero Covid policy is it worked beautifully in Wuhan, with the original Covid variant. That variant wasn’t anywhere near as transmissible as the current Omicron variants, so it was really possible to stop Covid in its tracks with a brief but severe lockdown. However, it was probably never possible for that strategy to work after the Delta variant hit, and certainly after Omicron. But Xi didn’t adjust his thinking. Of course, that’s the problem with dictators (and would-be dictators, such as one recently in the US): They get something in their head, and the fact that it worked in the past means it will definitely keep working in the present and future as well. Anyone who cares to disag...

Nextgov , an online service that reports on activities related to the federal government, published this article this week. I have to classify it as one of the most appalling, but at the same time the least surprising, articles I’ve read about the pandemic. The article describes a study done at Yale University. It’s summed up early on: The study finds that excess deaths during the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida. What’s more, the partisan gap in death rates increased significantly after vaccines were introduced. There had been previous studies that analyzed Covid death rates by county, then compared those with how the county had voted in the 2016 election. These found a correlation between counties that voted for Trump and ones that had a high Covid death rate. However, as the article points out, there might be other factors that account for the high death rate, such as availability of health care or average household s...