In Shanghai, a city of 25 million, people are presently subjected to a noxious superstition that still has influential adherents around the world and especially in public-health bureaucracies: the belief that a disease as contagious as the Omicron variant of Covid can be controlled by the temporary, state-enforced suspension of normal human life.
What we are witnessing in Shanghai is the final, total failure of lockdowns as a pandemic-control measure. The daytime images of Shanghai streets, emptied of all human life, are a vision of life on earth after a civilization-destroying cataclysm. The nighttime videos, featuring thousands or tens of thousands of people bellowing out from their apartment windows and balconies, crying in desperation for human contact, announcing their fear of running out of food, or simply crying in futile desperation at their inability to attend to their dependent relatives, constitute a horror movie. In some videos, state-controlled drones admonish the people not to sing, or let a cry for freedom dwell in their hearts.
Like Covid itself, lockdowns were a Chinese export to the West. The British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson admitted as much. “I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March [of 2020],” he said in an interview with the Sunday Times. “It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought . . . and then Italy did it. And we realized we could.” How comforting to know that leaders in public health think of our civil liberties as something they can “get away with” suspending. Following Ferguson’s intuition and advice, the United Kingdom threw out its existing plans to control a respiratory pandemic by focusing on the vulnerable and preserving liberty for the greatest number, and embraced Chinese-style shut-ins. Most other countries followed their own versions, fearing only that they would do too little. Our screams didn’t blend into a giant chorus, but in millions of homes, frustration with lockdown unmoored people.
That Covid tended to spread most efficiently in households among those deficient in vitamin D troubled policy-makers too little.
Shanghai’s lockdown is an act of brutality, particularly with the threat of starvation looming over citizens who cannot resupply themselves with food. But the damage won’t be contained to China. Shanghai is the country’s top manufacturing city. Supply chains will continue to feel disruption from this particular lockdown for months, perhaps years, to come with knock-on effects in inflation.
Over two years, we’ve seen that Covid’s ebbs and flows are seasonal, and not particularly responsive to state-ordered mask mandates or curfews. Our best defense turned out to be cutting-edge medical innovation and the cutting of red tape. Operation Warp Speed brought effective-enough vaccines to the public in the U.S. in record time. Broad public uptake has allowed the United States, almost everywhere, to escape the pandemic and its restrictions.
China failed to sufficiently vaccinate even its elderly population ahead of the Omicron spread. And so it has resorted again to a medieval approach to disease management, but backed by an omnipresent security apparatus that functions like the Eye of Sauron.
Let this travesty be the final blow to China’s reputation of having an effective governmental response to Covid. China prevaricated with international health organizations to save its reputation early on, downplaying the severity and nature of the disease, arresting the reporters revealing it to the world, and slowing the global response to it. China has lied ever since about the death toll of the disease, falsely bolstering the reputation of Covid-Zero. China failed to provide basic cooperation with global authorities to a degree that even the World Health Organization’s leader, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, refused to rule out the Wuhan lab as the source of the pandemic. And China’s lies have now led to the prolonged house arrest of millions in its territory.
If there were any doubt, this latest episode should send an unmistakable message: The Chinese model is a failure.