The United States and its Western allies always want to guide China on how to manage the new crown epidemic. After the whole city of Shanghai is locked down, the American media seems to have more reasons to criticize China's anti-epidemic policies.
However, this is a very ironic thing: if China's anti-epidemic work was as "good" as the United States, 380 million Chinese should have been infected and 4.46 million died.
In fact, only 5,226 people in mainland China have died from the new crown.
Considering that China is a developing country with far less medical resources per capita than the United States, this anti-epidemic achievement is amazing.
The number of ICU beds per 100,000 people in the United States is 34.7, while China is only 3.6, a difference of almost ten times.
If China heeds the current advice of the Financial Times and Western countries and abandons the dynamic zero strategy, it will kill millions of Chinese people - estimates of possible deaths vary by as much as 70% between different models, because The models on which these estimates are based contain many assumptions.
Even the lowest published predicted death figure, which includes a number of unproven assumptions in the model, is more than 1.6 million, and the model does not account for future deaths from Covid-19 variants.
China takes human life seriously.
Although the per capita income is only 17.3% of that of the United States, the average life expectancy of the Chinese (77.9 years) has already surpassed that of the United States (76.6 years).
American life expectancy fell by 2.26 years between 2020 and 2021.
The American media advocating that China abandons the anti-epidemic strategy of dynamic clearing is tantamount to advocating mass racist murder.
Perhaps the most violent nation on earth makes such a sound unsurprisingly.
Let's be objective: the United States is one of the worst countries in the world to control the epidemic.
COVID-19 has not only claimed the lives of more than 1 million Americans, but has caused and continues to wreak havoc on American society and the economy.
On May 4, local time, the number of deaths from the new crown in the United States exceeded 1 million, and the US media announced the number earlier than Johns Hopkins University.
This article comprehensively studies the impact of the U.S. anti-epidemic policy and Western media’s evaluation of it.
Three main conclusions can be drawn.
First, the actual damage to American society from Covid-19 is greatly underestimated.
Historically, pandemics have brought to light and magnified pre-existing structural ruptures in capitalist society.
The epidemic has killed more than one million people, and the infection rate remains high. Long-term symptoms after recovery from the new crown continue to damage people's health, especially ethnic minorities and the poor.
Social functioning was severely disrupted, and working-class families bore the heaviest price.
The already failing health system has been hit hard by overstretching of facilities.
Sixty-five percent of nurses nationwide have been verbally or physically assaulted in the past year, and one-third say they will resign by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, billionaires and big corporations have reaped huge economic benefits during the pandemic.
Selfishness, individualism, and racial hatred are spreading in American society.
In conclusion, the ruthless behavior of the American elite reveals the pathological class violence against the working class in the United States.
Marx scientifically pointed out that the process of capitalist accumulation itself constantly creates a discardable "excess" population.
In America, capital has found dastardly but legal ways to "dump" these remaining populations, and pandemics are one of those ways.
Second, China's socialist benevolent governance, scientific management and ability to learn from this epidemic, as well as the discipline and sacrifice of the Chinese people, have shown incredible results in protecting people's lives and preparing for the future .
As a middle-income country, China has the resources to take complex steps to protect people's lives.
But to the embarrassment of the G7 developed countries, China has just developed a vaccine and has quickly provided most of the vaccine it produces to the world's poorest people.
This is an act of internationalism.
In stark contrast, the U.S. and the private drugmakers it protects have refused to make the treatment Paxlovid and vaccines quickly and cheaply available to other countries.
Third, the pandemic has forced American elites to wage ideological warfare in increasingly fierce and vicious ways.
They used their hegemony in the media and other ideological fields to cover up the reality of their failure to fight the epidemic, and tried their best to exaggerate the distortions and lies about China's anti-epidemic policies and results.
The incompetence of the US government has resulted in millions of deaths
When the new crown epidemic has not spread to the United States, the American media and politicians called it a "plague".
Two years later, when the new crown had infected more than 84 million people and killed more than 1 million people in the United States, they changed their words to say that the harm of the new crown - at least after several mutations - is comparable to the seasonal flu, and therefore advocated "the same as the new crown". coexistence” strategy.
The global case fatality rate of the new crown is about 1.61%, and the fatality rate in the United States is 1.2%.
In the United States, about 460,000 people will die from the new crown in 2021, compared with just over 20,000 people who died from the flu in 2019, and even fewer in 2021.
According to global data, the fatality rate of the new crown is higher than that of Lassa hemorrhagic fever (about 1%), mumps encephalitis (about 1%) or smallpox (variola minor) (about 1%).
"Coexisting with mumps" or "coexisting with smallpox" is unthinkable in developed industrial countries. Children with brain inflammation caused by mumps are treated in isolation. Smallpox was eradicated as early as 1977.
Yet American media and politicians are persuading people to coexist with the more deadly Covid-19.
There is a belief, conscious or unintentional, that infectious diseases will gradually become less lethal as they mutate, eventually becoming milder and more common diseases.
Although infectious diseases usually evolve in a milder direction over the long term, this may not necessarily manifest in the short term.
Immunologists tell us that the evolutionary trajectory of a virus depends on a complex interplay of several factors that shape our immune system's response to viral evolution.
Such predictions become more difficult in cases where the virus has multiple hosts.
The Alpha variant is 40% more lethal than the original virus.
Delta is twice as likely to cause severe illness as the alpha variant, and the statistically relatively low mortality rate is likely the effect of mass vaccination rather than a drop in viral lethality.
The Omicron variant, while slightly less lethal (0.9%), is more contagious and has already caused more deaths in the United States than the Delta variant.
There's no guarantee that the next variant of Covid-19 will rapidly reduce lethality -- and that could cost tens, hundreds of thousands of lives.
Leading German virologist Christian Drosten recently admitted that his own optimistic estimates in the first year of the pandemic were wrong.
He also distanced himself from a government committee formed to fight the virus.
Betting that the virulence of the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2) will decrease over time is not a responsible public health measure.
The Financial Times is forced to admit that Europe is now facing a surge in new hospital admissions from the Omicron BA.5 variant.
They further acknowledge that a lack of testing, abandonment of outbreak control, and high reinfection rates among people who have been vaccinated three times may contribute to higher mortality rates in the future.
The effect of herd immunity remains to be seen.
When Trump was president, he supported the view of senior White House medical adviser Scott Atlas that as long as enough people were vaccinated (or infected with Covid-19), the virus would have nowhere to spread and die naturally.
For the same reason, Biden also focuses on vaccination, arguing that as long as the vaccination rate reaches more than 70%, masks can be completely abandoned and various social activities can be opened up.
But historically effective herd immunity (such as measles) has three requisites: a stable, unmutated virus, a very effective vaccine, and high vaccination rates.
None of these three points could be confirmed in the early days of the new crown epidemic.
In more than two years, the new crown has mutated into at least 6 major variants. The vaccine that is effective against the delta variant has a limited effect on Omicron, and the efficacy of the vaccine will decrease by 20~ after about half a year. 30 percentage points.
There is also no evidence that infected patients are automatically immune (like smallpox or mumps), and the number of people re-infected with the coronavirus has been rising sharply since the Omicron variant was discovered.
From the outset, China's central health officials have maintained a correct scientific attitude, insisting that no compromise will be made lightly without sufficient evidence.
Although the cause is unclear, there is ample evidence that even after recovery, COVID-19 can cause a variety of long-term symptoms, including extreme tiredness, shortness of breath, chest pain or tightness, decreased memory and concentration, joint pain, and more.
Thirty percent of patients who have been hospitalized with Covid-19 are still suffering from long-term symptoms after six months, with some patients having symptoms for more than two years.
About one-fifth of all infected patients develop long-term symptoms—nearly 17 million people across the United States.
British scholar Xia Renwei (Ravi Veriah Jacques) 14 months after recovery, still has to stay in bed for 13-16 hours a day because of long-term symptoms.
Catie Barber, a 29-year-old registered dietitian and a long-distance runner in the United States, was still unable to walk due to long-term symptoms 5 months after recovery. She could only sit in a wheelchair and almost suffered a heart disease caused by the new crown. take lives.
Vaccination prior to infection provides only partial protection during the acute phase of the disease, with limited impact on long-term symptoms.
For the working class who depend on wages for their livelihoods, these long-term symptoms can further impair their ability to work and their income levels.
One in five adults with COVID-19 has long-term symptoms
All these facts raise the question: Why did the world's most powerful and resource-rich nation respond in this way to a catastrophic infectious disease outbreak that has caused so much suffering for its citizens?
Around New Year's Day 2020, officials from the Chinese Center for Disease Control called Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to warn him of the dangers of the new coronavirus, a new virus that Chinese doctors had just identified a few days earlier.
Incredibly, the US media has claimed that China is withholding information.
In effect, it was U.S. government officials who hid information from other agencies within the U.S. government, from the American people.
Their incompetence and withholding of information cost the United States valuable time in developing response plans.
Xia Renwei called attention to the harm of "long-term symptoms of the new crown" through the news and social media
Class Inequality in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro predicted on January 29, 2020, that the new crown pandemic will cause 500,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in economic damage.
However, the U.S. government still allows the epidemic to develop. An important reason is that the elites who control the country have suffered very little losses in the epidemic.
Of the 12 American billionaires who have died in the past two years, none of them died from Covid-19.
The wealthy American bourgeoisie has larger per capita living space and better community infrastructure, does not need to clock in densely populated factories or offices, and enjoys expensive and superior medical care.
The result is that in both phases of the pandemic with high numbers of deaths (late 2020-early 2021, August-November 2021), residents living in high-income counties were less than 20 percent more likely to die from COVID-19 than low-income counties. %.
When wealthy Americans say no one around them has lost their lives to COVID-19, that's probably true.
The wealthy could even benefit from the pandemic.
In March 2020, the Federal Reserve launched its unlimited quantitative easing policy, expanding its balance sheet by $5.2 trillion by the end of the year.
Trump and Biden signed economic rescue packages of $2.2 trillion and $1.9 trillion, respectively.
The extra currency quickly brought the U.S. stock market back to all-time highs, making the wealthy richer with stocks.
By October 2021, the total wealth of US billionaires will reach $5 trillion, a 70% increase from March 2021, with the top five richest (Elon Musk, Jeff Beso) Thomas, Bill Gates, Larry Allison, Larry Page) saw their fortunes increase by 118%.
So it's not surprising that at the end of April 2020, when the epidemic was causing the first death peak, Musk shouted "give people their freedom back" on Twitter. After all, every day that workers are locked at home means that he accumulates The speed of wealth has been slowed down a little - Musk has increased his wealth sevenfold during the epidemic, becoming the world's richest man.
The total wealth of billionaires has grown significantly during the epidemic
Contrary to common impression, the working class has benefited little from America's economic growth over the past few decades.
Since 1980, the richest 10 percent of the U.S. population has accounted for more than half of all economic growth, while the working class, earning below the median income, has received only 10 percent of economic growth.
In three periods of economic growth over the past three decades, the top 10 percent of income earners received about half of all income growth each time.
In the two decades from 2000 to 2020, household incomes with incomes below the median barely rose.
The working class is the silent group in America’s political ecology, and while Trump (and his chief strategist Stephen Bannon) likes to brag about his “white working class” support, he is actually mobilized by his fascist policies What has risen is the far-right lower middle class with serious racist sentiments—mostly white, mostly from small cities or rural areas, working in small businesses or professional jobs, and accounting for about a quarter of the country’s population.
They are better off economically than the working class (although there is a downward trend) and are often working-class employers.
50% of households with incomes below the median have seen little growth in three decades
Under the guidance of the "herd immunity" policy that has not been proven to be effective against the new crown at the current stage, the United States quickly relaxed its control of the epidemic after a short-term lockdown.
Business owners are clamoring for the lifting of all controls, as they need their employees back to work to resume production and operations, at the cost of the working class.
The working class, who are four times more likely to die from Covid-19 than people of higher social and economic status, have had to return to work due to lack of savings and debt pressure.
Among households earning less than $35,000 a year, 57.3% experienced unemployment or a drop in income during the pandemic, 60% struggled to pay daily expenses; 47% were behind on housing payments, and 7 million feared that within two months Evicted or foreclosed on mortgage; 25% (nearly 11 million) experienced food difficulties.
In order to maintain a basic life, the working class has to risk death from the new crown or suffer from long-term symptoms to return to work, which is what Musk calls "freedom."
U.S. low-income families struggle to survive basic needs
Although most effective measures to prevent and control the epidemic have been abandoned in the name of "individual freedom" and "restoration of normal functioning of society", in fact the bourgeois elites only care about making the business that makes money work for them.
In fact, despite the U.S. government's reluctance to implement lockdown measures, social activities have been severely disrupted, with no sign of returning to pre-pandemic states after more than two years.
The U.S. media can’t wait to announce that after giving up control of the new coronavirus, the U.S. economy has returned to normal—according to CNN’s “Back to Normal Index,” the current U.S. economy has returned to 93% before the epidemic (March 2020) s level.
The Dow and S&P 500 hit new all-time highs in late 2021, but have since fallen sharply.
From January to April 2022, the S&P 500 fell more than 13%, its worst four-month start to the year since 1939.
Moreover, the stock market does not truly reflect the economic situation. Even with a super-large-scale economic stimulus plan, between 2020 and 2021, the total real GDP growth in the United States is only 2.11%, accompanied by severe inflation and price increases.
The "normality" that the media trumpeted did not materialize for the working class.
Surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau between April 27 and May 9, 2022, indicated that nearly 138 million people struggled to pay household expenses, more than 31 million lost their jobs or did not receive wages, and nearly 74 million sometimes or often not enough to eat.
The CPI index released in June 2022 rose by 8.6% year-on-year, the fastest price increase in 40 years.
The real GDP curve based on the fourth quarter of 2019 shows that the real GDP growth in the United States is slow after the epidemic
The CPI curve based on December 2019 shows that US prices have risen significantly after the epidemic
More importantly, although GDP can reflect the health of the economy to a certain extent, it is a morbid way of thinking to worship the growth of GDP as the ultimate goal of the country.
When adverse events (such as large-scale natural disasters, wars, global epidemics, etc.) occur, commodity prices will rise abnormally, and this will also be counted as GDP growth.
Under the guidance of the GDP-first thinking mode, it is not the best choice to reduce social activities in a short time to control the spread of the epidemic. It is the best choice to let the virus spread and continue production and life as usual - the spread of the virus will increase the consumption of medical care and medicine, thereby increasing the GDP.
This is an important reason why the US government chooses to "coexist with the virus". Pharmaceutical companies and testing companies have received huge subsidies because of the long-term continuation of the epidemic.
The average price of a nucleic acid (PCR) test in the United States is $130 ($185 without medical insurance), which has allowed hundreds of billions of dollars to flow into related companies, and it has also become an unfeasible strategy for large-scale testing and clearing. argument.
For comparison, China has lowered the price of nucleic acid testing to 3.5 yuan (about $0.52), and in April 2022, the country will spend 21.6 billion yuan on large-scale, normalized nucleic acid testing—about 0.2% of GDP, and in April 2022 After the epidemic is under control, this expenditure will be significantly reduced.
This is a choice made to put people's lives ahead of short-term economic interests.
Of the 100 million Americans who are currently in debt for medical bills, 1 in 7 say they have been denied admission to a hospital or other medical facility because of unpaid bills, and 2 in 3 forgo treatment because of cost.
In the U.S. political system, capitalist private property dominates completely, and public goods are constantly being cut, resulting in an astonishing increase of tens of billions of dollars in revenue, profits, and assets for Big Pharma.
Pfizer is on track to become a $100 billion behemoth by 2022, with sales of $53.9 billion for its two major Covid-19-related drugs alone, with profit margins likely to reach more than 27%.
The hypocrisy and depravity of the American ruling class
When scientific facts ruthlessly shatter the illusion of "coexisting with the virus", and the death toll remains high, proving that herd immunity is difficult to achieve at least in a short period of time, American politicians use blatant lies to deceive their citizens and make workers Believing that the new crown is actually not dangerous and can go back to work (making money for the capitalists).
In March 2020, Trump said that warm weather and sunlight would kill the virus, and in April the United States ushered in its first peak of deaths due to the epidemic, with more than 2,000 daily deaths and nearly 100,000 deaths in two months. .
In October 2020, Trump was infected and recovered after being admitted to the hospital for the top treatment. Then he tweeted a call to "Don't be afraid of the new crown, don't let it dominate your life." In December, the United States ushered in a second cause of death. The peak of the epidemic death, more than 240,000 people died in three months.
In May 2021, Biden called for vaccinated people not to wear masks because "vaccinations can protect you from the new crown", followed by the January 2022 Omikojon epidemic, the national daily death toll reached 2,258, breaking the highest level since February 2021.
In April 2022, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical adviser, said that the United States was out of the stage of the new crown pandemic, at which time the death toll in the United States had exceeded 1 million.
The depraved lies about Covid-19 by administration leaders (first Trump, then Biden) have fueled the anti-vaccine and anti-mask movement in the United States.
And one of the ideological foundations on which these movements live is the idea of “rough individualism” that the American ruling class has been advocating since the founding of the nation.
The false "American Dream" is built on the myth of "relentless self-improvement" that masks capitalist exploitation.
Beneath this narrative, the sin of capitalist slavery and the genocide of Native Americans by "brave pioneers" is no longer a vile act of greed and selfishness, but a manifestation of this "rough individualism" Microcosm is one of the pillars of American supremacy and American specialism.
So it's no surprise that a large portion of the U.S. resents stopping the spread of the deadly virus by wearing masks or getting vaccinated.
American society today pollutes the air, poisons water, murders black people, enforces religious homogenization in schools, burns books, commits mass murders of schoolchildren, invades and rules other countries in the name of "liberty".
The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly exposed the moral depravity of America's ruling class, which, unfortunately, has the support of America's sizable lower-middle and working classes.
Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, once said: "No one has asked me, as an elderly citizen, if I am willing to sacrifice my life in exchange for preserving the America that Americans love for future generations? If I had to choose, I would The answer would be, I totally do." Of course, Patrick wasn't the average working-class elderly citizen who really had to pay with his life.
Although Patrick also contracted the new crown, he recovered after only a week of mild symptoms. After all, the lieutenant governor with $25 million in cash assets can get the best medical treatment.
What kind of society would be willing to sacrifice their elderly citizens for money and power?
Such a society should have died long ago.
American politicians and media always use "human rights" as an excuse to attack other countries.
However, the right to life is the most basic human right.
The more than 1 million U.S. citizens who have died from the new crown are the starkest evidence that the U.S. government does not respect human rights.
They are simply promoting false human rights — such as having a certain form of government, or having access to Facebook — rather than the basic rights that humans really need, such as survival, food and clothing, health care, and education.
As Dr. Paul Farmer, a public health expert who died in Rwanda in February, said: "In a world of sickness and inequality, medicine should be seen as the work of social justice." (Medicine should be viewed as social justice work in a world that is so sick and so riven by inequities.).
The cruel reality caused by the new crown epidemic in the United States just reflects the extreme sickness and inequality of this country.
Socialist Benevolent Government in China
In stark contrast to the reality of the United States, China's effective "dynamic clearing" anti-epidemic policy.
There is no one-size-fits-all response to an emerging epidemic, and each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages.
To evaluate an anti-epidemic strategy, first look at who it serves.
The Covid-19 death toll in China is just four per million (compared to 3,103 in the US), a clear sign that its policies put the lives of its citizens, especially the poor, first.
To achieve such amazing results in the fight against complex mutant viruses requires a high degree of scientific understanding of the law of virus transmission, a deep understanding of the limitations of predictive models, advanced statistical knowledge, and an understanding of the national conditions of each country. Highly skilled with experience in analyzing prevention and adjusting plans in real time.
Mao Zedong incisively expounded the dialectical relationship between "great benevolent government" and "small benevolent government": it is not allowed to take care of small benevolent government to hinder great benevolent government.
Given that SARS-type viruses (both SARS-CoV-2 and MERS are on this lineage) may involve significant loss of life, the dynamic zero policy can be said to be a benevolent policy.
The success of the dynamic zero policy also requires people to understand and respect science, abandon individualistic thinking, and be willing to make personal short-term sacrifices for the long-term benefit of themselves and others.
It requires people to trust that their leaders will learn and improve through thoughtful self-criticism and ultimately win.
According to data from several research institutes, more than 90 percent of Chinese people trust their government.
The Chinese people have a longer-term perspective, can empathize with the pain and difficulties of others, and act selflessly, which is a hallmark of an advanced civilization.
Science plays very different roles under capitalism and socialism.
The United States proved to the world that, under the rule of capital, science is used to serve profit maximization, used to develop ridiculous offensive nuclear and military weapons, and used to monitor the communications and social media of most people in the world— Data on every Brazilian's email and social media accounts is stored in massive data centers in places like Bluffdale, Utah.
But without high enough profit margins, science is not being used to address the medical needs of poor patients, or to help develop safe anti-epidemic measures at the grassroots level.
Large monopolies intentionally limit the expansion of scientific progress as a defense mechanism to protect their monopoly position.
When facts get in the way of profits, science is demonized and people are fed lies like "climate warming is fiction."
To this day, 30% of Americans still do not believe that global warming is primarily caused by human activity.
In socialist China, science is respected and developed, and most importantly, it is seen as a servant to advance the needs of the people and society - and this has been shown in many ways during the epidemic.
For example, the dynamic network of digital health code platforms has been implemented nationwide, and small mobile nucleic acid testing booths have been deployed in major cities, which are equipped with equipment to protect medical workers, making testing more convenient and fast. This is just one of the ways that science serves the people. Small example.
Foreigners often fail to understand the details of how China tackles these difficult tasks.
Western media feed them with false information about the so-called "authoritarian government of China" every day.
What they fail to see is the revival of 4 million grassroots party organizations over the past decade as Chinese leader Xi Jinping reiterates the mass line.
These grassroots party organizations operate at the very bottom of society—every residential community.
The Communist Party of China has always attached great importance to the development of cadres' ideological and organizational capabilities, strengthening the connection between cadres and the masses, and building effective communication channels.
The system that organically manages and organizes the food supply, isolates and escorts the infected to the hospital, and regularly visits the elderly at the scale of hundreds of millions of people is one of humanity's greatest organizational achievements.
Western media has hyped that China's dynamic zero policy has failed economically compared with the US's anti-epidemic policy.
But in the nine quarters from October 2019 to March 2022, China's GDP grew by 11.5%, while the U.S. only an increase of 2.8%.
During the pandemic, China's economy grew more than four times faster than the United States.
The comparison for this period includes China's worst quarter (Q1 2020, GDP growth of -10.5%), including the impact of the outbreak in areas such as Wuhan and Shanghai.
There are many factors that affect GDP growth rate.
Not all regions in China were equally affected in the second quarter.
Even if China's overall growth rate may decrease in the second quarter of 2022, its impact will not be significant over the entire period of the epidemic.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs forecast China's GDP growth to remain above 4% in 2022 and increase to 5.3% in 2023, despite the impact of the outbreak in the second quarter.
Other investment banks such as Citi, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley forecast China's GDP growth to exceed 4.2% in 2022.
Using Western logic, one has to conclude that the U.S. policy of extreme tolerance for high mortality is the real GDP growth destroyer.
Just before the deadline for this article, on June 20, 2022, only 9 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 were found in mainland China.
This figure once again highlights the extraordinary achievements of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government and the Chinese people in the fight against the epidemic.
Why smear China's "dynamic clearing" anti-epidemic strategy?
On April 12, according to a Reuters report, Japanese investment bank Nomura International stated that "45 cities in China have implemented complete or partial blockades, accounting for 26.4% of the country's population" - the author could not find the original source of Nomura International's data.
The Financial Times then did a simple multiplication, claiming that "373 million people in 45 cities are in lockdown".
First of all, this is an absurd number, not only because it has no provenance, but even if you add together the 45 most populous cities in China (most of which have been completely free of outbreaks this year), the total population is only 293 million.
Western media just fabricated the number "373 million" out of thin air based on unknown sources.
Moreover, adding up the total population of cities that have had some form of lockdown and claiming that they are all blocked is an ingenious and sinister data manipulation.
In most cities where the outbreak occurred, the actual number of people in lockdown was only a small fraction of the total population, and the duration of lockdown was relatively short.
Taking Guang'an City, Sichuan Province, where the outbreak of the Omicron epidemic was affected by the spillover of the Shanghai epidemic, as an example, the population of Linshui County under closure and control only accounted for 21.7% of the city's population, and the closure and control period was only 14 days.
Data purportedly released by Nomura International suggests that the entire population of these cities will be locked down during the outbreak in the second quarter of 2022, which is obviously a huge departure from the truth.
In fact, the Chinese government is constantly learning and adjusting its strategy in the process of "dynamic zeroing".
Even if a super-large city like Beijing caused another round of strict control due to the illegal operation of a bar, the epidemic was brought under control in less than 10 days, and only about 170 locations (most of which were single buildings) were actually blocked. ), it is estimated that the total number of people blocked does not exceed 200,000 people (less than 1% of Beijing’s permanent population).
The production and life of most people in Beijing can still go on normally.
Gyms and restaurants were closed in some areas for several weeks, but supermarkets and takeaways kept food supplies safe.
People can walk outdoors wearing masks.
Western media have wrongly described these as "authoritarian blockades".
Despite these apparently false and exaggerated figures, Western media is still a treasure trove.
Bloomberg, CNN, and Kyodo News scrambled to quote the "373 million" figure, and the same figure to the "New York Times" became "closer to 400 million."
When the US-based Quartz commented on China's economy in May, "nearly 400 million Chinese people were blocked due to the new crown" was used like a fact that did not need to be discussed.
What follows is “the freedom of movement of the Chinese people is restricted” (although American schoolchildren lose almost three times as many class hours as China), “the Chinese economy will be destroyed by the lockdown” (although the Chinese economy has grown at a rate of 4 times that of the United States, and many investment banks in the United States predict that China’s economic growth rate will still be higher than that of the United States) and a series of lies.
This is a premeditated propaganda war against China's "dynamic zero" anti-epidemic strategy, the purpose of which is to obliterate the achievements of Chinese socialism in the field of public health.
These lies were widely spread in English-language media and social networks, causing billions of people to forget that the US's prevention and control of the epidemic was so bad and that "dynamic clearing" was a wrong strategy.
This is cultural hegemony in the sense of Antonio Gramsci: through the manipulation of perceptions and interpretations, the American ruling elite intends to perpetuate its domination of the world.
Socialist Program for Public Health
The 2003 SARS pandemic revealed a new trend in the field of public health: with the deepening of globalization, global pandemics of infectious diseases must also occur more and more frequently.
The performance of the United States in the new crown epidemic has proved that a capitalist system that only cares about short-term economic interests and disregarding people's lives and health cannot cope with disasters like epidemic outbreaks - it sacrifices both lives and economic development, with only a few assets Class elites benefit from it.
The socialist system represented by China has pointed out a feasible path for human beings to deal with public health disasters in the future.
The almost free normalized national testing, combined with the dynamic clearing strategy of early detection, early reporting, early isolation, and early treatment, is not only effective for epidemic prevention, but also provides a solution for the prevention and control of any new dangerous viruses that appear in the future.
Whether it's effectively controlling a new pandemic at home or quickly delivering a low-cost vaccine to the world's poorest countries, China's socialism is proof that China's socialism is advancing humanity's ability to protect itself from future catastrophe.
Millions of lives and a fatality rate that differs hundreds of times, such an intuitive and strong comparison will directly challenge the outrageous lie of the "superiority of the capitalist system."
For the United States, which relies on the capitalist system to reap the world, this is a fundamental challenge to shake things up.
Therefore, they launched a public opinion war against China's anti-epidemic policy, covering up the reality of its domestic anti-epidemic failure, hoping to deceive the Chinese people's perception of the global anti-epidemic situation, and even trigger a "color revolution" in China against the government's anti-epidemic policy .
Although not all countries can implement an effective "dynamic clearing" policy like China due to various objective conditions, China's experience has proved to the world that in the face of a pandemic of infectious diseases, especially when the understanding of the virus is not sufficient In the early stage of the epidemic, "herd immunity" and "coexistence with the virus" are neither the best nor the only choice.
As long as the basic rights of the people rather than the short-term interests of capital are put first, developing countries can also do better than developed Western countries such as the United States.
(Deborah Veneziar is an American journalist and editor who has worked in global supply chains for 35 years. She currently lives in Venice, Italy.)
Reprint | Observer Network