China’s decision to abruptly end its Zero COVID policy has gifted corporate media with a COVID horror story reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic. According to corporate media, China has exited Zero COVID only into walk into the second coming of the Black Death1.
What makes the media narrative on China’s COVID wave particularly fascinating is the media admits they have few facts on which to base their reporting, and then proceed to speculate wildly.
The true extent of Covid-19 in China is now unknown, given the fall in testing. Other countries have learned the painful way that pretending Covid-19 doesn’t exist doesn’t mean the disease disappears. Experts following the situation estimate that 60% of the Chinese population (accounting for 10% of the world’s population) will be infected in the next 90 days. Given these infection levels and the population’s low immunity, deaths could rise to close to 9,000 a day by the end of March.
No one knows how bad the wave of infections actually is, but “experts” speculate anyway. Because reasons, apparently.
This is not to say that the COVID wave is not significant. We should remember that the Zero COVID protests began because of a growing wave of COVID cases and fears of yet another lockdown.
However, awareness of a significant COVID outbreak is hardly grounds for ascribing credibility to reporting that treats theoretical models as empirical fact.
More than 5,000 people are likely dying from COVID-19 in China each day — in stark contrast to Beijing's official count of just seven deaths in the past week, according to Airfinity, a health data company.
Airfinity's data modelling shows China is likely seeing over 1 million COVID cases a day, in what it called a "stark contrast" to official figures, per a press release on Wednesday.
By way of comparison, during the last Omicron wave here in the US last winter, the highest daily case count recorded was 806,895, on January 15 of this year.
For comparison, Israel, which had an Omicron wave in roughly the same time frame, had a maximum COVID daily case count of 101,905 approximately 10 days later.
Given China’s larger population, one million cases per day is not out of the question, but it is far too soon for China to have reached that peak. A model which projects a daily case count of one million this early in the infection wave seems unlikely, given the levels where outbreaks have peaked elsewhere.
5,000 deaths per day is hardly improbable, however, given the US experience with multiple days where the deaths topped 4,000.
Even more improbable is the claim reported by Bloomberg of 37 million cases in a single day.
Nearly 37 million people in China may have been infected with Covid-19 on a single day this week, according to estimates from the government’s top health authority, making the country’s outbreak by far the world’s largest.
As many as 248 million people, or nearly 18% of the population, likely contracted the virus in the first 20 days of December, according to minutes from an internal meeting of China’s National Health Commission held on Wednesday, confirmed with people involved in the discussions. If accurate, the infection rate would dwarf the previous daily record of about 4 million, set in January 2022.
What Bloomberg fails to mention is that the 4 million cases in a single day figure was the total number of cases worldwide.
China may be the world’s most populous nation, but it is still just one nation.
Moreover, if 248 million Chinese were already infected during this COVID wave, then China would be well on her way towards reaching the end of the outbreak. While it is not beyond question that 248 million Chinese citizens will contract COVID, as with the case counts it is still too early in the outbreak for that figure to have been reached.
Additionally, even Bloomberg admits that there is no foundation for the case count, and no health official in China is prepared to go on record about how that 37 million figure was calculated.
How the Chinese health regulator came up with its estimate is unclear, as the country shut down its once ubiquitous network of PCR testing booths earlier this month. Precise infection rates have been difficult to establish in other countries during the pandemic, as hard-to-get laboratory tests were supplanted by home testing with results that weren’t centrally collected.
The NHC didn’t respond to a request for comment faxed by Bloomberg News. The commission’s newly founded National Disease Control Bureau, which overseas the Covid response, also didn’t respond to phone calls and faxes on Friday.
Far more realistic reporting comes from the South China Morning Post, which pointed out while Beijing’s COVID wave might have peaked or be peaking, for the rest of the country the virus still has some room to run.
Given the high transmissibility of the Omicron variants now circulating in China, the increase in cases is expected to be sudden but the size of the population and the regional disparities mean the peaks may vary from region to region.
And it would take a couple of months before the country can emerge from the tsunami of infections sweeping across big cities.
However, even the South China Morning Post could not resist trafficking in the fear porn about 37 million cases in a day, although it at least established that the number had no provenance whatsoever.
However, according to a memo purportedly from a National Health Commission meeting on Wednesday, there were nearly 37 million new infections nationwide on Tuesday.
The document was circulated online and cannot be independently verified. The official report of the meeting did not mention government projections, but the estimates in the memo tallied with those of other experts.
For its part, CNN was content with merely adopting a condescending, almost gloating tone as it reported on the great upsurge in deaths from COVID due to the ending of Zero COVID.
Now, as an unprecedented wave of infections rips through China, its state media is deliberately ignoring scenes of crowded hospital wards and packed crematoriums unfolding at home, while officials insist that by the government’s own count, few people are dying of Covid.
For nearly three years, China’s hardline zero-Covid policy shielded its population from the kind of mass deaths that haunted Western nations – a contrast repeatedly driven home by the Communist Party to illustrate the supposed superiority of its rule.
CNN goes on to mention reports of overwhelmed crematoria, and while CNN did visit one crematorium to report on its crowded conditions, we still have very little data on the mortality situation among Chinese COVID patients—Chinese officials won’t comment on them
When CNN visited a major crematorium in Beijing on Tuesday, the parking lot was completely packed, with a long line of cars snaking around the cremation area waiting to get in. Smoke billowed constantly from the furnaces, while yellow body bags piled up inside metal containers.
Grieving family members waiting in line clutched photos of the deceased. Some told CNN they had been waiting for more than a day to cremate their loved ones, who died after contracting Covid. One man told CNN the hospital where his friend passed away was too full to keep the body, because so many people had died there. His friend’s body was left on the hospital floor, he said.
What CNN fails to provide—and what may not be available to corporate media—is the broader empirical data that establishes that all crematoria are overwhelmed specifically with COVID victims. So far the evidence we have is strictly anecdotal. It is compelling in its way, but we are on thin logical ice to extrapolate from that evidence an understanding of the mortality situation across China.
How bad is the COVID outbreak in China? Ultimately, we do not know. From what observations we do have, we can safely say the outbreak is “bad". More than that we cannot rationally say.
Yet the corporate media wants you to believe the outbreak is apocalyptically bad. They want you to believe that COVID-19 is a dangerous and deadly disease, and that only the disproven and discredited mRNA inoculations (which are demonstrably dangerous and deadly) can save you from the evil SARS-CoV-2 virus. And to that end they will happily feast on China’s misfortune, hyping the severity of the outbreak with almost orgasmic pleasure.
China will have its experience with COVID. It will not be our experience.
China will suffer whatever deaths it will from this virus. It will not be our suffering.
China in the end will make its peace with the virus, as indeed we will and may already have.
Yet China will survive COVID, as we already have and will continue to do. This outbreak will pass, as all the rest have. There will be future outbreaks, and they too will pass.
Nowhere in this reality is there cause for fear or panic. The pandemic is over, and so too is the Pandemic Panic Narrative, despite the media's best efforts to perpetuate it.
Do not be taken in by the corporate media's fear-gasm over China's COVID outbreak. Focus on the facts, the evidence, and the data we already have.
The term “Black Death” refers to the bubonic plague pandemic which swept through Europe between 1347 and 1353, in which an estimated 1/3 of the population of Europe died. https://www.britannica.com/event/Black-Death/Cause-and-outbreak
Wasn’t it just last week (or the week before) that msm was reporting that despite the lockdowns being lifted, Chinese citizens were continuing to self-impose them?
Thanks for in-depth real reporting that seems to clear out a lot of MSM smoke.