The Wall Street Journal‘s reporting from inside China has been excellent lately, and the weekend edition offers another long read that underlines in red the now-obvious point that the outbreak of Covid-19 in China, and particularly in Shanghai, is much, much worse than official authorities are willing to say:
Shanghai, which has been in near complete lockdown for a month to contain the current wave of the virus, the worst to hit China since the pandemic began in Wuhan two years ago, has reported 450,000 Covid-19 cases since March 1.
Yet for weeks, Shanghai officials reported no deaths in the entire city from Covid. On April 18, officials finally started announcing a death count, and now says 36 people have died this week, mostly elderly.
A Wall Street Journal reconstruction of the Donghai hospital outbreak provides a more complete picture of the suffering in China’s financial capital, with at least 40 deaths of Donghai residents alone as of April 6. The deaths came after Covid spread through the hospital, sickening hundreds of patients and staff, according to more than a dozen patient families and health workers, WeChat messages and hospital documents.
China’s vaccines against Covid-19 were never that effective, and evidence suggests that the Chinese vaccines are even less against effective against Omicron. Still, I suppose you would rather have a somewhat effective vaccine than no vaccine. But in a baffling decision, the Chinese vaccination program didn’t focus on the elderly: “Despite a high rate of vaccination in China overall, with 88 percent in the country vaccinated, millions of elderly people, including most of Donghai’s residents, remain unvaccinated. In Shanghai, only 62 percent of people 60 and over are vaccinated. The rate drops to a minuscule 15 percent for those over 80.”
China’s National Bureau of Statistics warned in May of last year that “increasing elderly population will reduce the supply of labor force and increase the burden on families’ elder care and the pressure on the supply of basic public services. . . . The aging of the population has further deepened, and in the coming period, (we will) continue to face pressure for the long-term balanced development of the population.” Decades of the One Child Policy have created a gender imbalance, and much fewer workers and a much larger group of aging and elderly who need care.
I suppose if an autocratic regime were cynical and cruel enough, they could see Covid-19 as an opportunity to thin the herd of senior citizens, to alleviate the country’s mounting costs of elder care in future years.
As I wrote back in December, “Never mind straight answers on the origin of Covid-19 in China; we can’t even get straight answers on the status of Covid-19 in China right now. Everyone in public health and international diplomacy knows it. And just about everyone averts their eyes from the nonsensically incredible official statistics from Beijing, because they’re hoping that ignoring the current lie will make the Chinese government more honest in the future.”