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Rafal M Smigrodzki's avatar

It's worth noting that the CCP staked a strong claim to being superior to other governments on their ability to contain the virus they deny having made. Their 50-cent army of propagandists have been incessantly crowing about how great the CCP is for being able to effectively stamp out the virus that brought the mighty US down. There is a lot of face to be lost if this achievement was to fail in a visible way, and in China face is everything. And of course the CCP can also fake almost every number that comes out of China.

Given the above I would not be surprised if their currently low numbers were a stage of denial, when there is already enough Omicron going around but still low enough to pretend that containment works. At some point the mass infection wave might become impossible to hide but even then they might just stop testing and pretend it's just some sniffles, not the big bad Covid.

A lot of strange things can happen in China.

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gt's avatar

Re. China containment – I would be extremely surprised if daily cases stay under 50p/m this year. I put it at 15%.

I think Australia's experience in 2021 is a reasonable (if imperfect) analogue here. For the first half of the year, it was completely intent on keeping cases at zero. With lockdowns, closed borders, and lots of restrictions, it was able to do this effectively. Then Delta arrived, and everything became much harder. Even with prolonged lockdowns, fairly good contact tracing, and stringent isolation requirements, cases continued to climb. By late August, it hit 50d/cpm (despite most of the country still having no community transmission), and has rarely dropped below since. I think this point is instructive because when Australia first hit 50d/cpm (Aug. 28), it was still very much pursuing something close to a zero-COVID approach; on that date, the lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne still had another 43 and 54 days to run respectively. Once it became obvious that cases were never going back to zero, harsh restrictions became more difficult to justify, and most people accepted that some form of 'living with COVID' was the only viable approach. Now, Australia is at over 3,000d/cpm.

I expect Omicron to do to China what Delta did to Australia. China mostly managed to contain Delta (which, admittedly, I wouldn't have predicted), but Omicron raises the bar. Delta made everything harder – Omicron makes things near-impossible. Very roughly, I would say that the original COVID strain was a 3/10 to contain, Delta was a 6/10, and Omicron is a 9.5/10. Australia's zero-COVID dreams died at 6/10; I don't think that China's withstand 9.5. From what I've read – and on current form – it does seem likely that the Chinese population will continue to accept containment measures that would be unworkable almost anywhere else, and so that does add a little uncertainty. But even with the toughest of restrictions, I still struggle to see cases staying that low. 50d/cpm is only 70,000 daily cases, in a country that has 65 cities of 1m+ people.

That’s how I end up at 15%. I'm tempted to go even lower, but China is unique in a lot of ways, and I’ve been surprised by it before. Also, by terrifying its citizenry and mocking the West for its COVID-tolerance, the Chinese government has really backed itself into a corner on this. To lose control now would be incredibly embarrassing (particularly in the year of a Party Congress), and so I expect the CCP to do all it can to avoid an about-face.

But I’m not betting against Omicron here.

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