China ’s Stunning U-Turn on Zero-COVID Takes Xi Jinping From Suffocating Control to Callous Inaction

Even for China, where the distance between official narrative and empirical evidence is often a chasm, the last few days have been jarring. On Tuesday, officials announced five deaths from COVID-19—up from two the previous day, which were the first recorded in the country since Dec. 3. On Wednesday, there were officially none. But a glance online tells a different story. Dozens of hearses line up at a Beijing crematorium; bodies wrapped in orange plastic pile in hospitals; patients on ventilators are crammed on a ward floor. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The decision by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership to roll back its stringent zero-COVID policy and allow the virus to proliferate has led to a surge in cases and an immense strain on health services. It’s a quite staggering reversal. On Nov. 10, President Xi Jinping—the self-anointed “commander-in-chief” of a “people’s war” against the virus—instructed his Politburo to stick “resolutely” to “dynamic zero-COVID.” Residents of Shanghai were forcibly detained in quarantine facilities over the summer because of a single case in a neighboring housing block. Read More: China’s Zero-COVID Trap But zero-COVID was virtually abandoned on Dec. 7, with China’s top medical adviser now comparing the Omicron variant to “flu.” On Dec. 13, a tracking app that had tyrannized every life in China for the past three years wa...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized China Londontime overnight Source Type: news