Gas prices are still really high compared to a year ago, but they’ve dropped a little bit in the past few days. According to the American Automobile Association, the current average price of a gallon of regular gasoline nationwide is $4.25 — down from $4.32 a week ago. AAA notes that gasoline demand dropped slightly in the past week, and the price of a barrel of oil declined a bit, closer to $95 per barrel from a peak of more than $100 per barrel.
Ironically, the pandemic-driven shutdown of certain cities in China is one of the factors pushing down the price, as producers expect lower demand: “After crude prices spiked in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, crude prices changed course in reaction to China announcing new lockdowns alongside rising COVID-19 infection rates. The price of oil has moved lower due to market concerns that crude oil demand will decline, as it did in 2020 when countries sought to curb COVID-19 transmission rates.”
The Omicron outbreak that China’s “Zero Covid” policy was supposed to stop continues to rage; the city of Shinzen has reopened, but Shanghai, a city with roughly 26 million people, is reporting a record number new cases . . . of about 750 new cases. The reliability of official Covid-19 statistics from China is highly debatable, but with Chinese state authorities who insisted they had few or no cases for the past two years now admitting they have hundreds of new cases, and China reporting Covid-19 deaths for the first time in a year . . . Omicron has clearly arrived in China and is working its way through the population. There’s not a ton of data on how the major Chinese vaccines work against Omicron, but the early evidence suggests that at least one of them isn’t effective at all:
An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine. Antibody levels against omicron rose among those who had also received a booster shot of the mRNA vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech.
But when researchers compared these samples with blood serum samples stored at Yale, they found that even those who had received two Sinovac shots and a booster had antibody levels that were only about the same as those who’d received two shots of the mRNA vaccines but no booster shot. In other studies, the two-shot mRNA regimen without a booster has been shown to offer only limited protection against omicron.
Separately, researchers at the University of Hong Kong found that:
Most individuals after given two doses of the vaccine (either BioNtech or Coronavac) do not produce sufficient levels of serum antibodies against the new Omicron virus variant. . . . Only five out of 25 Biontech vaccine recipients had neutralizing ability against the Omicron variant virus, and the vaccine efficiency was significantly reduced to 20 – 24 percent. Compared to the original SARS-CoV-2 strain, the titer of neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron variant has decreased by 36 – 40 fold. None of the serum of the 25 Coronavac vaccine recipients contain sufficient antibody to neutralize the Omicron variant at the limit of 1 in 10 dilution.
Because the evidence suggests that China has a population vaccinated with a vaccine that doesn’t work against Omicron, then it’s no wonder that they’re shutting down cities. An unnamed former official with China’s National Health Commission is nervous, telling the Singapore-based Straits Times, “Given the size of China’s population, even the low fatality rates reported overseas could mean millions of deaths.”
Even if that dire scenario doesn’t come to pass, daily life in China is likely to be significantly disrupted in the coming weeks and months. That means fewer Chinese will be driving anywhere — and that means China will be using less gasoline, bringing prices down around the globe, at least a little bit.