Tag: Disease Rates

In China, Living Not ‘With Covid,’ but With ‘Zero Covid’

Chin@Strategy

SHENZHEN, China — The signs of a looming lockdown in Shenzhen, China, had been building for a while. The city had been logging a few coronavirus infections for days. Daily Covid tests were required to go pretty much anywhere. Individual buildings had been sealed off. So when a hotel employee woke me up a little after 7 a.m. to explain that we were not allowed to step outside for four days, my initial disorientation quickly turned to resignation. Of course this happened. I live in China. As the rest of…

Shanghai Declares Victory in Covid Outbreak, but Lockdowns Continue

Chin@Strategy

Shanghai health officials said on Tuesday that the city had brought the Covid outbreak there under control, after a nearly two-month lockdown that disrupted residents’ access to food and medicine, stoked widespread public outrage and brought China’s financial center to a standstill. At a news conference, officials pledged to restart normal life as soon as possible, with a goal of reopening fully by June. Some businesses, bus lines and parks had been allowed to resume operations on Monday. Twelve trains were also allowed to leave from Shanghai’s Hongqiao train station…

A Coming Fall Surge?

Chin@Strategy

Expecting a fall surge The Biden administration is preparing for the possibility that 100 million Americans will be infected with the coronavirus this fall and winter, according to an administration official. That’s lower than the number of Americans who were infected during the Omicron wave in December and January, but still amounts to roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population. Should that scenario play out, my colleague Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports, the administration’s goal is to prevent a spike in hospitalizations and deaths. One way that might be accomplished would…

Your Tuesday Briefing: A Marcos Victory?

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering the Philippines presidential election, the resignation of Sri Lanka’s prime minister and a pandemic pivot in Taiwan. Another Marcos for president? With more than 90 percent of election returns counted in a preliminary tally, Ferdinand Marcos Jr. appeared sure to win the country’s presidential election early Tuesday morning. He has a huge lead over Leni Robredo in the Philippines’ most consequential vote in recent history. Here are live updates. Marcos, the son of the former dictator who was ousted 36 years ago, appealed to a public…

Beijing’s Testing Surge

Chin@Strategy

Beijing’s testing surge Beijing is racing to test nearly all of its 22 million residents three times over five days in a high-stakes bid to avoid a similar fate as Shanghai, where millions of residents have been forced into an almost unbearable monthlong lockdown. Today millions of Beijing residents took their second round of tests, and officials from the Chinese capital announced that they had uncovered an additional 46 cases. The city identified three more neighborhoods today as high-risk and four more as medium-risk, designations that both prompt lockdowns. Overall,…

Your Wednesday Briefing: Beijing’s Mass Testing Plan

Chin@Strategy

Good morning. We’re covering Beijing’s scramble to quash the Omicron variant, Germany’s pivot to supplying Ukraine with heavy weaponry and a brownface controversy roiling Hong Kong. Mass testing in Beijing Faced with a growing number of coronavirus infections across Beijing, city officials are trying to test most of the Chinese capital’s 22 million residents in the hope of avoiding the pain of imposing a citywide lockdown like in Shanghai. Beijing is ordering mass testing across the city more quickly than in Shanghai, where officials started testing on a similar scale…

China and the World Wait

Chin@Strategy

Beijing’s waiting game A new coronavirus outbreak in China’s capital has raised concerns that Beijing may become, after Shanghai, the next Chinese megacity to put life on hold to contain the spread of the Omicron variant. Seventy people have tested positive in Beijing since Friday. In the capital’s fashionable Chaoyang district, home to most of those cases, the government initially ordered all 3.5 million residents to take three P.C.R. tests over the next five days. Bloomberg later reported that mass testing would take place in 11 of the city’s 16…

China’s Covid Lockdowns Stir Memories of a Planned Economy

Chin@Strategy

Yang Wenhui should be a proud example of China’s rise from economic rubble to global powerhouse. Growing up poor, he ate so much cabbage that he didn’t touch it again for many years. He worked as a farmer and a construction worker before joining the country’s nascent logistics industry. In 2003, he started his own freight logistics company, striking gold as online shopping took off in the 2010s and products moved swiftly between provinces. Then the Omicron variant started spreading in China. In the government’s zealous pursuit of its “zero…

Shanghai’s Low Covid Death Toll Revives Questions About China’s Numbers

Chin@Strategy

This month, a prominent Shanghai physician, Miao Xiaohui, estimated that the number of excess diabetes deaths could reach nearly 1,000 by the end of his city’s lockdown. His estimate was based on the Wuhan excess mortality study, which, in addition to tracking Covid deaths, also showed that deaths from noncommunicable diseases, including heart disease and diabetes, were 21 percent higher than expected during that city’s lockdown. “Why can’t we consider a middle road” between zero Covid and living with the virus, Dr. Miao wrote in a blog post. The post…

From the U.S. to China: A 3-Month Quarantine Horror Story

Chin@Strategy

Before boarding his flight from Los Angeles to the Chinese city of Guangzhou, Xue Liangquan, a California-based lawyer, knew he was in for a bit of a headache. To visit his parents in eastern Shandong Province in January, for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began, Mr. Xue, 37, had already shelled out $7,600 for airfare. He had submitted negative test results to the Chinese authorities, as required for entry. Upon arrival, he would have to do three weeks of quarantine. Even so, he never could have foreseen just…