The shadow of the coronavirus once again eclipses the start of another year with a loop of images that were believed to be buried:
collapsed hospitals, massive infections, travel restrictions, falsified statistics
... And again, in an unexpected revival of 2020, it is China,
patient zero
of a pandemic that was believed to be bound by vaccines and now stands again as a risk to global health.
President Xi Jinping's commitment to the rigid policy of Covid Zero has been revealed as
a serious political and health error.
First, because
restricting the circulation of the virus with bolts and massive tests has only delayed the time to face the disease
.
And the Chinese population is doing it now suddenly, deprived of natural immunity after three years with hardly any presence of Covid and without the vaccine serving as a shield because it is less effective than Western ones and does not achieve a sufficiently strong immunization percentage.
The consequences of the president's castling are predicted to be tragic: the British health consultancy Airfinity is already talking about
9,000 deaths per day and forecasts that deaths will reach 1.7 million in April 2023
.
Secondly, because the Chinese government has irresponsibly prioritized containing the tide of street protests -the largest since Tiananmen, which have put its absolute powers in check for the first time- with an express opening that ignored the health risk, much more calculated if the end of the restrictions had come gradually.
And thirdly, because once again -as happened with the first strain from Wuhan- it has opted for a dangerous lack of information transparency that has set off alarm bells all over the world.
, forcing many countries to adopt measures to protect their populations from possible variants that can jump the immune barrier of vaccines.
Spain has joined Italy, the US, Japan or Taiwan when it comes to requiring travelers from China to have negative tests or vaccination certificates.
And it is that the last ingredient of this perfect storm is
the reopening of the borders of the Asian giant on January 8,
coinciding with the Lunar New Year festivities: the first to be celebrated with pre-pandemic normality and for which millions of displacements are expected.
The West is facing the crisis well armed, thanks to mass vaccination and the immunity acquired from the high circulation of the virus over the years, although it is reasonable to reinforce surveillance protocols to detect new variants.
But the crucial thing is
that Beijing change course and make available to the scientific community real and transparent data on the evolution of the disease
.
Opacity and isolation didn't work in 2020. They won't work in 2023 either.
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