Zero COVID Worked So Well In Shanghai, Let's Try It In Beijing
The People Are Running Scared... With Good Reason
Even as the madness of the Shanghai lockdown continues, the failure of Zero COVID gets another grim testament as Beijing residents face the prospect of a lockdown in the Chinese capital.
Beijing is racing to track a Covid-19 outbreak that may have been spreading in the capital for a week, city authorities said on Saturday, raising the prospect more stringent restrictions could soon be implemented in line with other Chinese cities.
Beijing officials said at a press briefing Saturday that they were tracking cases across multiple districts and involving students, tour groups, and interior decoration workers. The capital reported 22 new local cases on Saturday, national health authorities said Sunday morning.
"The city has recently seen several outbreaks involving multiple transmission chains, and the risk of continued and undetected transmission is high. The situation is urgent and grim," municipal official Tian Wei told reporters Saturday. "The whole city must act immediately."
In the past 24 hours, Chinese social media has been flooded with videos and photos of bare store shelves as people stock up on food, fearing the worst.
At the same time, state-affiliated media outlet the Global Times is pushing out images of fully restocked shelves in an apparent bid to assure the people that the food crisis of Shanghai will not be repeated.
In person classes are already being cancelled for one Beijing district, after a staggering ten people tested positive.
Local media reported that in Beijing’s Chaoyang district, the government ordered the suspension of in-person after-school activities and classes. The city government is now conducting a round of mass testing to look for more cases.
It would be redundant at this point to point out the ideological—even pathological—obsession the CCP has with the Zero COVID Policy, or its delusional, unscientific, Faucist basis. The lunacy of China's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic has not changed from Shanghai—it's still Pandemic Paranoia.
That paranoia is now poised to spread to Beijing, and the Chinese people are scared. After Shanghai, they should be, and not of the virus.
I've been thinking about this for a while but I assume most of these procedures are done in an attempt to save face and look good on the international stage. I find it quite ironic that COVID became big during the year of the Summer Olympics; a game intended on bringing different countries and cultures together to battle it out and see who is the best. Only with COVID, it was which country could lock down and limit spread the best sans civil liberties.
I did find it quite uncomfortable how much we applauded countries like New Zealand only for them to double down on their draconian measures in an attempt to still seem like it's the model of what to do during a pandemic much the same way Hong Kong and China has been doing it.
It’s really hard to tell what China is doing as an outsider. Xi has an “election” soon and there is political opposition in Shanghai so lockdown could be related. Most things happen for either power or money.