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| Today’s front page of SCMP print edition. Online version. |
At the top it seems Xi Jinping favours the ZCP because that’s what seems to have worked early days in Wuhan and its province Hubei. Remember people locked into their flats? 13 provinces, 120 million people, locked down? Makeshift hospitals out up in a week? (To cope, by the way, with the fact that China has only one-tenth the ICU beds as the US).
We predict at our peril about Covid, as we’ve all got so many things wrong in this pandemic. Still, I predict that ZCP will fail. At least if China ever plans to open its borders. Which maybe it doesn’t. Who knows? It’s self reliant, after all. Especially since the rest of the world decided to “decouple” from it.
I’m on Zhang’s side in this debate. So are senior scientists in Hong Kong, like Dr Joseph Tsang, chairman of the HKMA. If it’s ZCP, then, says Dr Tsang,“there’s no end in sight” for getting back to normal or some semblance of normalcy.
ADDED: Dr Zhang comes across as measured (IMO), noting that “most experts around the world believed Covid-19 would not go away soon” and that we must “study how to coexist with the virus”, while Guo counters with ad hominem: that living with the virus is “irresponsible” and “reckless”. Given what we now know about the efficacy of vaccines even with variants, the spread of Delta and its epidemiological cycle, and the non-Covid damage of lockdowns, where is Guo’s evidence for that? Indeed given his focus on what the US is doing, we might be forgiven for suspecting his stance has more to do with US-China tensions than “the science”.
ADDED (15 August): our local SCMP editorial comes out against ZCP as a long-term policy. Here. [Internet Archive]
16 August: The Zero Covid Delusion
