Four thousand years’ experience?
“It seems unavoidable that those advocating the current pandemic and preparedness agenda are intentionally misleading the public in order to achieve their aims. Cost-benefit analyses are essential for any large-scale intervention, and their absence reflects either incompetence or malfeasance”. David Bell.
Our media have always been hostile to cost-benefit analyses of government policies, partly because they involve numbers, which are hard, and partly because those who hate our freedoms would compare our results to theirs.
Our Covid policy outcomes, its costs so wildly disproportionate to its benefits that our media simply lie. Says the New York Times: China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Mess Proves Autocracy Hurts Everyone. When Xi lifted Covid restrictions, he was opening the gates of Hell:
* CNN, Dec. 7: Dark days ahead as China moves away from zero-Covid policy.
* Bloomberg, Dec. 9: China abandoning Covid policies. Deaths may reach 2.1 million.
* NYT, Dec. 10: Tsunami of Covid Cases Will Test China’s Hospitals.
* Japan Times, Dec. 17: China deaths through 2023.
In reality, since 2019, China’s Zero Covid cut GDP growth from $6 Tn. to $3 Tn. and killed 100,000, compared to our 1.1 million dead and $1 Tn growth.
China’s secret weapon
By the 12th. century, individual and neighborhood lockdowns, combined with hygiene, herbs and exercise, were standard anti-epidemic measures, which is why the Black Death and similar plagues killed few Chinese. Public health has been a major government responsibility for over a thousand years and, when Covid came calling, Beijing was waiting, locked and loaded.
After SARS, in 2013, President Xi’s top problem solver, Liu He, planned for an outbreak as lethal as SARS but more infectious. The best defense against epidemics, he told Xi, was a healthy citizenry. Xi promoted health and built the outdoor sports industry into a $35 Bn colossus and, by 2019, China’s life expectancy was poised to overtake America’s. Liu nevertheless assumed that an epidemic would establish itself and presented a three-phase plan
Phase I
Professor of Public Health, C. Saratchand, explains the sequence of the first phase:
The government regulates the entry and exit of non-residents to prevent transmission of infections from outside.
If there is an outbreak, there is a localized lockdown followed by free and universal testing. All those infected in the cluster are institutionally treated free of cost. During this localized lockdown, essential needs such as food and healthcare are met through a dedicated and trained team of activists.
The solidarity inherent in such a strategy is conducive to universal masking and universal and free vaccination. As a result, outbreaks are quickly controlled, and the duration of localized lockdowns is relatively short. Most importantly, the number of deaths is either very low or zero.
Moreover, such a dynamic zero-Covid strategy is likely to involve lower economic costs than a “living with Covid” strategy. The dynamic zero-Covid strategy, by rapidly eliminating infections, prevents the rise of new variants that may prolong the pandemic. In others words, the “dynamic zero-Covid” strategy is both socially optimal and cost-effective.
Remember those eight new hospitals that mushroomed in Wuhan within days of the outbreak? They had been planned long before. The 42,000 medical specialists who flew into Wuhan that night had long before sworn to give their lives to protect society (twenty did).
Phase II
Liu designed Dynamic Covid Zero Phase II to simultaneously protect the economy and public health so that, even as Covid peaked, strategic industries ran 24×7, thanks to special trains carried a thousand engineers directly to chip fabs. Protecting regular people, feeding and caring for millions of shut-ins, developing vaccines, extinguishing outbreaks, updating clinical manuals, loading billions of data points into supercomputers.. and only locking down seven percent of the population.
Medical SWAT teams were the dynamic in Dynamic Covid Zero. They trained other teams and refined their techniques so that the lockdown that lasted 172 days in Wuhan took 10 in much bigger Shanghai. Teams taught local authorities to manage mass isolation and closed-loops, to propagandize exercise, diets, masks, herbs, supplements and sunlight. Hospitals offered free testing, treatment, hospitalization and rehab so that, for all its inconvenience, most people appreciated Dynamic Covid Zero and cooperated fully.
To predict the virus’ behavior, every province had three hospitals in different cities collecting weekly samples from 15 emergency cases, 10 severe cases, and all fatal cases, sequencing and analyzing their genomes, and uploading the data to the national Covid genome database.
Data scientists added a billion health records to the AI-driven, digital model of the fast-evolving epidemic: “Every optimization was more scientific and precise, more focused on the characteristics of the virus, the international and domestic epidemic situation, changes in domestic and foreign prevention and control strategies, and adjustments for time, season and situation”. After publishing predictions like the chart below, Beijing sent medical teams and supplies and reinforcements before their peaks arrived.
Phase III
In November, 2022, three years after Wuhan, Health Minister Sun Chunlun told Xi that the population was as healthy, well informed and vaccinated (92%) as it would ever be, that IC units had doubled to 132,000, that prompt clinical intervention now minimizes deaths, and that Omicron has low lethality. It was time to let go the reins.
Benefits
Under 100,000 Covid-19 deaths.
Over $3 trillion GDP growth, up 13.8% since Wuhan.
Unemployment and inflation, at 5% and 2.5%, remained flat.
Real wages continued rising, albeit more slowly.
Life expectancy reached 77.1 years (America’s fell to 76.1).
Conventional Sinovac vaccine provided stronger protection at ten percent of the cost, without the side effects of mRNA treatments.
And that, children, is why we don’t do cost-benefit analyses.
Further reading
A complete Covid Timeline; Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom. Weekly newsletter, Here Comes China.
[1] Liu negotiated the US Trade Agreement, designed both the Covid program and the program to make China IC independent.
