At least 1 million people in the city of Wuhan, the city where covid-19 first spread to humans in late 2019, have entered lock down, as China shows it is not ready to give up on eradication. With less than 1,000 new cases reported on Wednesday in a country of over one billion people, they are succeeding at controlling the Pandemic. Three cases were detected in the area, so the district was put into lock down. All entertainment venues are closed and public transportation is suspended as a result of the lock down. People can't leave their homes for the next three days in certain neighborhoods.
The National Health Commission reported 583 cases of covid-19 that were not life threatening. The US reported over 163,000 cases on Tuesday and over 500 deaths from the disease.
There have been 229,066 confirmed cases and 5,224 deaths in China since the beginning of the Pandemic. According to the New York Times, the US has reported over 90.6 million cases and over one million deaths.
Many people in the West insist that China must be engaging in a coverup of how many infections it has had over the past two years, but it is actually countries like the U.S. where we don't know the true number of cases. Many states no longer offer free covid-19 tests and Americans who test positive at home rarely report their case to the local health department.
China restricts civil liberties in the name of public health and will likely continue doing so for the foreseeable future as the Pandemic doesn't seem to be going away soon. It would be great if western countries didn't look back five years from now and wish they'd tried to eradicate the virus as well. With the seriousness of long covid and the potential for even worse variant to develop in the next couple of years, the rest of the world could see itself with a significantly weaker population.
Life is all about trade offs, and those of us in the west hope we have made a good deal. Covid-19 can rip through the community. The stakes are high for long term prosperity in liberal democracies.
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