Is the cure really worse than the disease? The social impacts of lock downs during COVID-19.

Hi, thank you for watching Digging to China. I'm Dong Shuang. If you have not done so already, please subscribe to my channel. Thank you very much. In 2020, China was where the world's COVID lockdowns began. Today, it is where it is finally ending. Until recently, China's communist regime still committed to zero COVID. During his speech at the Communist Party Congress in October, President Xi Jinping said that there would be no wavering on zero COVID because of the need to prioritize saving people's lives. It appeared that the lockdowns, the mass testing, the health code scanning, the quarantine, the travel restrictions were all here to stay for the foreseeable future. We have adhered to the supremacy of the people and the supremacy of life, adhered to dynamic zero COVID, and achieved major positive results in overall prevention and control of the epidemic and economic and social development, she said. Now it's finally over. Testing booths are dismantled. In Beijing, you no longer need to show a negative test result on your smartphone to enter the supermarket, catch the bus, or exercise in the park. In Shandong province, you won't need one to buy cough drops. Those who do catch COVID may be allowed to self-isolate at home instead of being caught to the quarantine center. It's unclear how complete the relaxation will be, but what is certain is that the coronavirus cannot be squeezed back into its bottle. What triggers the policy shift? It appears the anti-lockdown protests did it. But simply put, the rules were unsustainable. People were finding ways to evade them, and the costs of maintaining them were bankrupting China's municipal governments. By late October, 28 cities and over 200 million people were under lockdown, but cases nonetheless were drifting up, with record numbers recorded in early November. It is possible that a post-Communist Party Congress pivot was always intended, and the protests were tolerated to a degree to provide cover. How does Beijing explain its way out of zero COVID measures? The CCP's justification for the pivot is that the Omicron variant causes milder disease than earlier SARS-CoV-2 variants. I found it funny. This is like saying that water is wet. Omicron's mildness was recognized more than a year ago by the South African doctor who discovered it. After 2021 winter, Western countries started to open up and lifted up their restrictions. By March 2022, Iceland was one of the multiple European countries to have abandoned all non-pharmaceutical interventions. Its chief epidemiologist advised the government at the time that as many people as possible needed to be infected with the Omicron virus, because vaccines alone are not enough. As spring advanced, New Zealand, Australia, Korea, and Taiwan all abandoned the lockdown. By summer, China stood alone. Now it too has recognized the virological reality. Xi Jinping has invested significant political capital in zero COVID. He touted it as a shining example of how the Communist Party delivers good governance to the Chinese people. Xi believed so firmly in zero COVID policy that China did not even bother to develop a contingent plan for its failure. Xi owns this failure. CCP owns this failure. Many decent Chinese doctors and scientists have long disapproved of zero COVID, but they know it is unwise to criticize Xi openly. As zero COVID ends, a massive infection spike will likely follow, as it did in Hong Kong. Elderly deaths could run well into the hundreds of thousands. Articles in the New York Times and The Guardian also pointed this out. But they are far too kind to the Chinese leadership. They say that the crisis demands difficult choices. The only difficult part is to admit lockdowns are a complete failure and cannot realistically be implemented. China is now indeed in a difficult position, a position of CCP's own making. The even more difficult part is to admit that even with an extreme disregard for liberty, human dignity, and privacy, lockdowns fail and the virus wins. Milder lockdowns never stood a chance. All they achieved was to kick the pandemic canes a few yards down the road and to encourage variants that spread more efficiently. For instance, the first COVID variant, Alpha strain, began its expansion during the UK's second lockdown in November 2020. Some supporters of lockdowns still point to the example of Taiwan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. They argued that lockdowns can work if a country isolates itself, giving time for a vaccine to be developed and deployed, and that China has simply failed to grasp this opportunity. Well, the gains of lockdowns would always be uncertain. The costs are not. The US tried to isolate itself with border closures in early 2020 and failed. Melbourne endured more days of lockdown than any other city worldwide while developing a police force that would embarrass a Central American junta. Moreover, the success of warp speed vaccine development remains uncertain for future pandemics. It is undeniable that lockdowns caused vast collateral damage to the economy, to relationships, to education, to mental health, to the work ethic. Due to illnesses that were neglected while health systems were obsessed with COVID, access non-COVID mortality is currently being recorded across Europe, the US, and Australia. If this continues for another year, non-COVID access deaths could begin to exceed those attributed to COVID. We as humans are prey to occasional respiratory pandemics, as Russian flu, Asian flu, Hong Kong flu, and worst of all, the 1918 Spanish flu have demonstrated. In the past, we as a human race sweated protecting our vulnerables as best we could, tending our sick and mourning our dead. Otherwise, life continued. There was no lasting economic or social harm. This approach was still advocated in the influenza preparedness strategies drawn up by the UK Department of Health in 2011 and the World Health Organization in 2019. Yet in 2020, country after country adopted a different, untested course. Perhaps we pivoted because Wuhan's lockdown seemed to work and because influential scientific and media opinion demanded we follow suit. Regardless, the resulting damage is unprecedented, both in China and the West. Lockdowns to contain respiratory pandemics simply don't work. That is my take. Thank you for watching. Please leave a comment and subscribe to my channel. Just click the subscribe button right here. I'll see you again shortly. Until then, be well.