Looks like someone came back from some other country that China had spread the virus to and infected the local population. Imagine how angry the Chinese were when this happened again. China reports first COVID-19 deaths in more than a year (msn.com)
With an variant as infectious as Omicron -- China's "zero Covid" strategy with large scale shutdowns for a single case is no longer viable . They will need to drop this strategy and adopt measures more akin to other nations to address Covid. The most important being large scale vaccination to prevent serious illness and reduce spread.
As noted before the Chinese vaccines were much less effective than western vaccines in stopping the spread of Covid. Omicron is highly infectious and vaccine evasive. While vaccines will greatly reduce serious illness and death from Omicron Covid... they will reduce spread but not stop spread. Due to this it is very difficult to maintain a "zero Covid' policy in the face of a very infectious disease. Omicron is the second most infectious disease on the face of the earth next to measles. China may have vaccinated a large percentage of their population with Chinese vaccines but they lag behind in boosters which are crucial in reducing spread (and severe disease).
As mentioned earlier... it is very difficult to maintain a "zero Covid' policy in the face of a very infectious disease. Not only is Omicron vaccine-evasive in terms of transmission; the population can only endure lockdowns for limited periods of time. The other reality is that full lockdowns make little sense when a vaccine is easily available which greatly reduces serious illness & death -- thus stopping your hospitals from being overrun (which is a key reason for full lockdowns). China would be better off with implemented restrictions such as masks and social distancing recommended by WHO to address the Omicron Covid situation rather than full lockdowns with large scale economic & social disruption. At the same time the Chinese authorities need to stop lying to the public about the actual death and serious illness figures -- which is difficult to do when the leadership is wrapped around the axial of proving how little Covid they have due to their "fantastic" "zero Covid" policy. The Chinese Public May Finally Have Had Enough of the Government's Zero-COVID Approach https://time.com/6168488/chinese-public-zero-covid-19/ For the past two years, Chinese President Xi Jinping has enjoyed a luxury unavailable to many other leaders: a population almost entirely on board with his approach to COVID-19. But in the last week, as censors took their foot off the pedal on Weibo for just a few hours, the extent of Xi’s new challenge became clear. As case rates in Shanghai reach levels not seen since Wuhan in 2020, the Chinese public are having to make a fresh set of calculations, weighing up the human and economic costs of some of the world’s strictest lockdown measures. Online, some social media users blasted a policy that has cut many in Shanghai off from fresh food, medical care and, in the most extreme cases, their children—all while the city’s authorities claim there’s been just a handful of deaths from COVID-19. Until recently, China’s zero-COVID policy—enforced by sealed borders and short, sharp lockdowns—had been an easy sell. While much of the rest of the world was plunged in and out of lockdowns, its government was delivering something approaching life as normal. The problem is that now, while other countries begin “living with the virus,” China’s central leadership remains bound both politically and practically to its zero-COVID strategy. It’s difficult to overstate the political legitimacy that has been staked on China’s ability to protect its population from the virus, not to mention the two years of high-profile firings that have incentivised local officials down the chain to pursue zero-COVID at all costs. And even if Xi was willing to take the political hit, the health system just isn’t up to the challenge: ICU capacity is just one tenth that of the U.S., and behind impressive overall vaccination rates lurks a figure to strike fear in the heart of any epidemiologist—only 51% of over-80s are fully vaccinated. Yet while the authorities may be clear on China’s direction, the public is less convinced. Shanghai’s outbreak has exposed the human fallout of heavy-handed lockdown measures. Many apartment complexes have struggled to access basic goods, while some critically ill patients have been denied access to routine medical care. Most contentious of all has been the separation of children and babies from their parents as part of a policy to quarantine all positive cases in government facilities. To be clear, the damage is still far less than letting the virus rip through the population. Gloating pundits seem to have conveniently forgotten the West’s own death rates in their rush to share videos—some of which are easily proven fakes—that show the supposed impending collapse of Xi’s regime. However, the authorities still have a real problem on their hands. All of a sudden, social media users are openly discussing the possibilities of scrapping some of China’s strictest measures , or even moving towards living with the virus. Others just vent frustrations built up over weeks or months trapped indoors. This is by no means a wholesale turn against China’s policy—there’s still no shortage of fierce zero-COVID loyalists—but it still would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. The real risk is that authorities inadvertently play into this emergent polarisation. Consider Shanghai’s staggeringly low rate of symptomatic cases—on April 5th, as cases soared, just 322 out of nearly 20,000 reported cases were classed as symptomatic, compared to a rough rate of 50% elsewhere in China and abroad. Mass testing, which picks up normally undetected cases, is part of the reason, but so is a purposefully high barrier for classifying cases. The insistence of Shanghai authorities that only pneumonia-like symptoms count as confirmed symptomatic cases may keep headline figures artificially low, but long-term it makes life trickier: how do you justify such heavy-handed measures for a disease you claim is overwhelmingly asymptomatic? Authorities face a similar Catch-22 on deaths. Despite repeated anecdotal reports of deaths in elder care facilities, and more than 320,000 cases, Shanghai’s official death rate for this wave still sits at 17. It’s no surprise that local officials have been reluctant to announce the city’s first deaths on their watch but refusing the public transparency on the real risks of Omicron will do little to encourage China’s 17 million unvaccinated over-80s to come forward for vital jabs. This mixed messaging is likely to result in a growing rift in public opinion. Already social media users are beginning to accuse each other of belonging to opposing “zero tolerance” or “co-existence” camps. And while infections in Shanghai may be passing their peak, the debate won’t be going anywhere. New outbreaks are beginning to pop up across the country, promising new challenges if they spread to under-resourced cities and rural areas—or to the political centre of Beijing. Local governments across the country will be learning from Shanghai’s mistakes, and antiviral drugs will help cushion the blow of new outbreaks, but neither will address China’s underlying issue: a distinct lack of an exit strategy. And without a clear plan from the top, debate and dissent at the grassroots level will only grow. Two years of genuinely world-leading success means China, understandably, doesn’t take kindly to international moralising about its approach to COVID-19. But it does have to listen to its own people—and it looks like they could be about to head in very different directions.
The current population of China is 1,449,296,426 as of Wednesday, April 20, 2022, minus One. Tragic. Supply chain shortage is totally worth it. Rest in peace comrade. Simply tragic.
Surprisingly low Shanghai COVID death count spurs questions https://apnews.com/article/covid-science-business-health-shanghai-76bb35f8313f60258baa83460efdc14c Lu Muying died on April 1 in a government quarantine facility in Shanghai, with her family on the phone as doctors tried to resuscitate her. She had tested positive for COVID-19 in late March and was moved there in line with government policy that all coronavirus cases be centrally isolated. But the 99-year-old, who was just two weeks shy of her 100th birthday, was not counted as a COVID-19 death in Shanghai’s official tally. In fact, the city of more than 25 million has only reported 25 coronavirus deaths despite an outbreak that has spanned nearly two months and infected hundreds of thousands of people in the world’s third-largest city. Lu’s death underscores how the true extent of the virus toll in Shanghai has been obscured by Chinese authorities. Doctors told Lu’s relatives she died because COVID-19 exacerbated her underlying heart disease and high blood pressure, yet she still was not counted. Interviews with family members of patients who have tested positive, a publicly released phone call with a government health official and an internet archive compiled by families of the dead all raise issues with how the city is counting its cases and deaths, almost certainly resulting in a marked undercount. The result is a blurred portrait of an outbreak that has sweeping ramifications for both the people of Shanghai and the rest of the world, given the city’s place as an economic, manufacturing and shipping hub. An Associated Press examination of the death toll sheds light on how the numbers have been clouded by the way Chinese health authorities tally COVID-19 statistics, applying a much narrower, less transparent, and at times inconsistent standard than the rest of the world. In most countries, including the United States, guidelines stipulate that any death where COVID-19 is a factor or contributor is counted as a COVID-related death. But in China, health authorities count only those who died directly from COVID-19, excluding those, like Lu, whose underlying conditions were worsened by the virus, said Zhang Zuo-Feng, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If the deaths could be ascribed to underlying disease, they will always report it as such and will not count it as a COVID-related death, that’s their pattern for many years,” said Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong’s medical school. That narrower criteria means China’s COVID-19 death toll will always be significantly lower than those of many other nations. Both Jin and Zhang said this has been China’s practice since the beginning of the pandemic and is not proof of a deliberate attempt to underreport the death count. However, Shanghai authorities have quietly changed other standards behind the scenes, in ways that have violated China’s own regulations and muddied the virus’ true toll. During this outbreak, Shanghai health authorities have only considered virus cases where lung scans show a patient with evidence of pneumonia as “symptomatic,” three people, including a Chinese public health official, told the AP. All other patients are considered “asymptomatic” even if they test positive and have other typical COVID-19 symptoms like sneezing, coughing or headaches. This way of classifying asymptomatic cases conflicts with China’s past national guidelines. It’s also a sharp change from January, when Wu Fan, a member of Shanghai’s epidemic prevention expert group, said that those with even the slightest symptoms, like fatigue or a sore throat, would be “strictly” classified as a symptomatic case. Further adding to the confusion, the city has overlapping systems to track whether someone has the virus. City residents primarily rely on what’s called their Health Cloud, a mobile application that allows them to see their COVID-19 test results. However, the Shanghai health authorities have a separate system to track COVID-19 test results, and they have the sole authority to confirm cases. At times, the data between the systems conflict. In practice, these shifting and inconsistent processes give China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “wiggle room” to determine COVID-related deaths, said the Chinese health official, allowing them to rule out the coronavirus as being the cause of death for people who didn’t have lung scans or positive test results logged on their apps. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic. In response to questions about Shanghai’s COVID-19 figures, China’s top medical authority, the National Health Commission, said in a fax that there is “no basis to suspect the accuracy of China’s epidemic data and statistics.” Shanghai’s city government did not respond to a faxed request for comment. Statements from the authorities are little comfort to the relatives of the dead. Chinese internet users, doubting the official figures, have built a virtual archive of the deaths that have occurred since Shanghai’s lockdown based on firsthand information posted online. They have recorded 170 deaths so far. Chinese media reports on the unrecorded COVID-19 deaths have been swiftly censored, and many criticisms of Shanghai’s stringent measures expunged online. Instead, state media has continued to uphold China’s zero-COVID approach as proof of the success of its political system, especially as the world’s official death toll climbs past 6.2 million. Earlier this month, doubts over the data burst into public view when a Shanghai resident uploaded a recording of a phone conversation he had with a CDC officer in which he questioned why city health authorities told his father he had tested positive for COVID-19 when data on his father’s mobile application showed up as negative. “Didn’t I tell you to not look at the Health Cloud?” said the official, Zhu Weiping, referring to the app. “The positive cases are only from us notifying people.” Others skeptical of the data include relatives of Zong Shan, an 86-year-old former Russian translator who died March 29. Despite testing positive and being moved to a government quarantine facility, online test results showed Zong supposedly was negative for COVID-19 on the day of her death. “My relative, like most of the other people in Shanghai who were notified as positive, all reported negative results” on the Health Cloud app, one of Zong’s relatives said, declining to be named for fear of retribution. Zong was taken to a government quarantine facility from the Donghai Elderly Care Hospital on March 29, and died there that night. The family was told by hospital staff she was being transferred after she tested positive for COVID-19. But they didn’t think the virus was the biggest threat to her health — rather, it was the dearth of nursing care at the quarantine facility. Zong needed to be fed liquids and couldn’t eat without assistance. She had been in stable condition before the transfer, said a relative. When the family asked for the cause of death, doctors didn’t give a clear answer. “They gave me very vague answers. One minute they said it was stroke, then they said this was also just a hypothesis,” said the relative. “But on one point, they were very clear, they said it had nothing to do with COVID. Her lungs were clear.” Lu, who was also transferred from the Donghai hospital, would have celebrated her 100th birthday on April 16; her relatives had ordered a cake and gotten permission to host a small celebration Thursday. But when she tested positive, the family made mental preparations for her death, acknowledging she had lived a long life. But the strange thing, a relative said, was the night before she died, the doctor had specifically called the family to let them know Lu was now testing negative for COVID-19. Ultimately, the doctor said she died because the virus had worsened her underlying illnesses, said the relative, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the issue. Further, the family knew of another patient from the same hospital, a neighbor, who died the day after being transferred to a quarantine facility on March 25 and also had not been counted. Jin, the Hong Kong virologist, noted the potential political benefits of Shanghai’s low official COVID-19 death toll. “They might claim this is their achievement, and this is their victory,” Jin said.