From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   China, Once Pioneer of Zero Covid, Shrugs Off Looming Wave   
   By Brian Spegele, May 25, 2023, WSJ   
      
   Roughly this time last year, Beijing was a Covid-19 fortress teetering on the   
   edge of a lockdown. As daily case counts crept up to around 100 in this   
   mega-capital of more than 20 million people, residents cleared out grocery   
   stores, lined up for near-   
   daily testing and postponed travel out of the city due to the risk that they   
   wouldn’t be allowed back in.    
      
   Today, Beijing and the rest of China are gearing up for a new Covid-19 wave   
   that a top Chinese medical expert says could infect 65 million people a week   
   by late June. Office workers are already calling in sick, many of them   
   catching the virus for the    
   second time in six months.    
      
   And yet the mood this time is decidedly blasé.   
      
   Restaurants, train stations, concert venues and soccer stadiums are teeming.   
   Tourists clutching umbrellas in Tiananmen Square seem more worried about   
   sunburn than Covid-19. One of the few outward signs of the latest wave is that   
   more people are wearing    
   masks on the streets—but even then mask-wearing is optional and many are   
   left to dangle around the chin.    
      
   The contrast points to the dramatic changes in China’s approach to the virus   
   that have completely altered daily life in the country. As the government now   
   races to rewrite some of the history of its handling of Covid-19, many Chinese   
   are eager to move    
   on.    
      
   For 3 years after Covid-19 first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan,   
   China adopted a zero-tolerance approach to the virus. The strategy boiled down   
   to confronting Covid-19 with brute force, cutting off chains of transmission   
   by isolating people    
   who might have come into contact with the virus. It used heavy-handed   
   lockdowns to control people’s movements and tracked them with intense   
   digital surveillance.    
      
   Today, the government says defeating Covid-19 is impossible.   
      
   “It won’t be gone once and for all,” Zhong Nanshan, a top Chinese   
   epidemiologist and government adviser during the pandemic, said at a   
   conference this week.    
      
   Partly responsible for the latest wave is the XBB.1.5 subvariant, Zhong said.   
   This strain of the Omicron variant has also been found widely in the U.S.,   
   transmitting more easily than other subvariants. Zhong said modeling showed   
   Covid case counts in    
   China would reach around 40 million infections a week by the end of May before   
   peaking around 65 million cases a week by late June, adding that most people   
   infected for a second time would have mild symptoms.    
      
   A huge wave of Covid-19 cases swept over China beginning late last year after   
   the government started relinquishing controls. An estimated 1.1 billion to 1.2   
   billion people—as much as 85% of China’s population—are believed to have   
   been infected with    
   Covid thus far, Zhong said.    
      
   Public anger and frustration with the country’s zero-tolerance Covid-19   
   controls culminated in November with street protests in Beijing, Shanghai and   
   other cities. Many Chinese say they are happy the government finally   
   relinquished control, despite the    
   huge wave of sickness and death that swept over the country late last year and   
   early this year.    
      
   https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-once-pioneer-of-zero-covid-sh   
   ugs-off-looming-wave-2485e089   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
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