GOOD MORNING FROM LONDON
Ajay Rajadhyaksha is the Global Chair of Research at Barclays and in a FT article, today noted that officials in Shanghai unveiled new lockdown measures because they found just 7 new Covid infections outside of Government-mandated quarantine sites. Beijing officials have said that the threshold for unwinding curbs + restrictions is “zero new community cases for seven consecutive days…standards far more stringent than the rest of the world”.
But China, as Rajadhyaksha notes, is “the only major country that has never had a significant Covid wave. The US had more than a million cases a day in 2021. The UK and Continental Europe saw similar large waves at different times last year. India had a horrific surge last Spring.”
He goes on to state “the less than hundred cases a day that the country is seeing is an incredibly low number…from a health standpoint, China has an impressive record of managing Covid. Adding up government statistics the world over, almost 7m have officially died due to Covid, including more than 1m Americans. Other estimates are higher: the WHO’s estimate is that there have been 15m Covid deaths. In contrast China’s Covid losses are a few thousand”.
The Western media – rather than acknowledging China’s “putting people first” policy + China’s minimal death numbers instead focuses on the effect of lockdown on people’s right to walk the streets. It becomes a freedom issue. China’s people have been imprisoned. Well not quite as deliveries are being made to people in high rise buildings and, of course, China’s people are alive and not dead. Prime Minister Johnson predicted 20,000 deaths in the UK – today the figure is 130,000+. Would the children and grandchildren of the dead prefer to be visiting their families for tea + cakes or re-arranging the flowers on their graves?
