Does China Have This Under Control?
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https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/does-china-have-this-under-control/
As of yesterday, China’s National Health Commission claims that the country has 82,758 reports of confirmed cases and 4,632 deaths. (And not a single case in the entire 2 million people in the People’s Liberation Army.) Four days ago, Wuhan health officials revised their local death toll from 2,579 to 3,869. The Wall Street Journal quoted some Wuhan residents who said they believed the death toll had to be higher. One half of the previous total is 1,289.5; the increase was 1,290 — almost as if someone arbitrarily decided to raise the existing death toll by fifty percent.
China may be hiding cases, deaths, and the full extent of the outbreak, but the bigger the epidemic, the harder it is to hide. The situation in China is better than at the height of the outbreak, but how much better? To the extent that non-Chinese sources can report on conditions in Chinese cities, life appears to be returning to something resembling a non-crisis state. Everyone must wear masks just about everywhere, and you have to regularly update your health conditions on your government-monitored app:
At checkpoints throughout the city, police and security guards demanded that anyone seeking to come and go present a QR code on their mobile phones that rates the user’s risk of catching the coronavirus. Green codes granted unrestricted movement. A yellow code required seven days of quarantine. Red meant 14 days of quarantine.
Local governments created the algorithms behind the ratings at the behest of China’s State Council and rolled them out in Wuhan and hundreds of other cities on apps hosted by China’s largest tech companies: Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, and Baidu Inc. To receive a rating, users must download an app embedded in one of the tech giants’ ubiquitous payment, messaging, or search engine platforms. The apps work differently by city and province, but they typically require users to register with basic information — name, national identity card number, phone number, and home address. Subsequent questions are more invasive, quizzing users on health status and travel history, and asking them to identify any close contacts diagnosed with the virus.
The Guardian’s correspondent in Wuhan describes “employees wait[ing] in lines outside of office buildings to have their throats swabbed, to make sure they do not have the virus before going back to work.”
But every now and then, some report slips out indicating that China is still dealing with a significant problem.
On April 6, “an official newspaper said there could be 10,000 to 20,000 such [asymptomatic] cases in Wuhan. The report was swiftly deleted online.”
Chinese authorities are still claiming they’ve defeated the virus at home, and almost all of the new cases are coming in from travelers abroad. Unsurprisingly, this official spin is fueling xenophobia and racism among Chinese citizens. You probably saw the reports of out-in-the-open discrimination like the McDonalds in Guangzhou declaring that “black people” were not permitted inside. In Beijing, ambassadors from African nations say they and their staff are being hassled and harassed.
