Four and a half million people.
That’s how many Chinese people would have died from Covid-19 had its government taken the same approach to the pandemic that the United States has taken, and gotten the same results.
Instead, China has had 15,000 deaths from Covid—most of these from an outbreak in the spring of 2022 in Hong Kong, which has its own healthcare system.
Meanwhile, the United States has lost more than a million people to Covid since the pandemic began. Deaths currently continue at the rate of about 450 a day, which would add up to roughly 160,000 a year if present trends continue.
The New York Times (9/7/22) continues to present the Chinese government’s saving millions of lives as an unmitigated disaster.
Clearly China and the United States have very different systems, and what works in one place would not necessarily work in the other. But given the remarkable success that China has had in protecting its population from a deadly and pernicious virus, surely US-based journalists are examining what lessons China has to teach us?
No, not if you work for the New York Times. There you’ll be writing yet another in a series of articles about how China has had the enormous misfortune of avoiding mass death.
“China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Bind: No Easy Way Out Despite the Cost,” is the headline of the latest iteration (9/7/22), written by Vivian Wang. The article begins:
Tens of millions of Chinese confined at home, schools closed, businesses in limbo and whole cities at a standstill. Once again, China is locking down enormous parts of society, trying to completely eradicate Covid in a campaign that grows more anomalous by the day as the rest of the world learns to live with the coronavirus.
But even as the costs of China’s zero-Covid strategy are mounting, Beijing faces a stark reality: It has backed itself into a corner. Three years of its uncompromising, heavy-handed approach of imposing lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing to isolate infections have left it little room, at least in the short term, to change course.
The New York Times maintains it’s the country with the orange line, not the dark blue one, that has the Covid policy problem.
Nowhere in the article is any comparison of the respective death toll in China and the US. Or any hint that life expectancy in the US has now dropped below that of China—76.1 vs. 77.1 years, respectively (Quartz, 9/1/22)—an acknowledgment that would render ridiculous the Times‘ assertions that that China’s “government has pushed propaganda depicting the virus as having devastated Western countries,” and that President Xi Jinping “has prioritized nationalism over the guidance of scientists.”
But it’s not just the Covid death toll that the Times has to hide in order to make its anti-China spin remotely credible. Much of the piece deals with the hardship supposedly caused by the zero-Covid policy: “The social and economic cost will continue to increase,” insists one of the article’s relatively few sources, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Yanzhong Huang (author of the New York Times op-ed “Has China Done Too Well Against Covid-19?”—12/29/20—which argued that “China’s comparative success now risks hurting the country”).
Wang sure does make the economic situation in China sound grim:
Many Chinese have found ways to cope, even if reluctantly: putting in longer hours to scrape up more money, cutting back on spending. Complaints about a shortage of medical care or food often emerge, but some residents say they support the overarching goal….
Youth unemployment is soaring, small businesses are collapsing and overseas companies are shifting their supply chains elsewhere. A sustained slowdown would undermine the promise of economic growth, long the central pillar of the party’s legitimacy.
But what is the actual cost of China’s Covid success? In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, China’s GDP grew by 2.2%, while the US’s shrank by 3.4%. In 2021, the US economy bounced back, with 5.7% growth—but not as much as China, which grew 8.1%. Projections are for the US to grow by 1.3% in 2022, while China is expected (by Goldman Sachs) to grow 3.0%.
When you add it up, China is expected to be 13.8% richer at the beginning of 2023 than it was when the pandemic began—whereas the US will be just 3.4% better off. So which country’s belts need tightening as a result of its Covid strategy?
The New York Times (9/7/22) reported that China “suffered from low vaccination rates”—but a glance at the Times‘ own vaccination tracker shows that China in fact has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world.
The Times similarly had to suppress any comparative numbers to make it seem like China’s vaccination strategy was particularly dangerous:
Buoyed by its early success at containment, the party was slow at first to encourage vaccination, leaving many older Chinese vulnerable….
While other countries prioritized vaccinating the elderly, China made older residents among the last to be eligible, citing concerns about side effects. And it never introduced vaccine passes, perhaps sensitive to public skepticism of its own vaccines.
In late July, about 67% of people aged 60 and above had received a third shot, compared to 72% of the entire population. Medical experts have warned that an uncontrolled outbreak could lead to high numbers of deaths among the elderly, as occurred during a wave this spring in Hong Kong, which also suffered from low vaccination rates.
Go to a helpful page of the New York Times website called “Tracking Coronavirus Vaccinations Around the World,” however, and you’ll find that China isn’t “suffer[ing] from low vaccination rates”; it actually has one of the highest rates of Covid vaccination in the world, with 93% receiving at least one dose and 91% “fully vaccinated.” The latter number compares with 86% in Australia and South Korea, 84% in Canada, 81% in Japan and Brazil, 79% in France, 76% in Britain and Germany—and 67% in the US.
That last number, in China, is treated by the Times as a dangerously low percentage of the elderly to have received booster shots—but in the US, only 41% of those aged 65–74 have received booster shots, along with 42% of those 75 and over—and just 26% from 50–64. Isn’t the US booster rate much more ominous?
Well, yes—and that’s part of the reason that tens of thousands of elderly people will die this year as part of the US’s effort to “learn…to live with the coronavirus.”
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
“Learning to live”
By teaching to die
Mr. Naureckas—
Your reporting on Covid continues to distort. Your very first statement is completely ridiculous.
You state: “Four and a half million people. That’s how many Chinese people would have died from Covid-19 had its government taken the same approach to the pandemic that the United States has taken”
How did you come to this amazing conclusion? There is absolutely no way to prove this statement based on the JHU paper you cite, and yet you pass this off as if it’s a done deal conclusion. That is not how epidemiology or statistical data is applied. You cannot generalize measures in one nation and apply them to others as you have, certainly not without demonstrating how you come to that conclusion. There are so many confounders as to make your slap-dash statement completely indefensible.
Your reporting on this topic all along has been severely lacking in scientific understanding and is an editorial no better than propaganda. This is not a defense of the NYT, by the way, which is also propagandized on this topic.
You should be ashamed, and should FAIR.
It seems for all your complaining, you didn’t read the paragraph that begins: “Clearly China and the United States have very different systems, and what works in one place would not necessarily work in the other.” No-one is claiming that they can empirically prove that 4.5m Chinese would have died; but the evidence is strong that a vast number would do, were the Chinese people to adopt the laissez-faire, ‘let the virus run free’ approach of the US government.
I suggest you retract your complaint.
Where is this strong evidence that a vast number would die?
Further and consider this. Just think of a different and more positive outcome if the Chinese government had accepted Western offers to import, then distribute, a far better qualitative RNA vaccines vs the inferior (CoronaVac and Sinopharm) vaccines that were developed in China. Ongoing WHO studies currently and continue to suggest that the immunity from two doses of either the mentioned vaccine wanes rapidly, and the protection offered to older people is very limited.
No thanks to mRNA. And where’s the study-based evidence to support your claims of superiority? Certainly Moderna and even more so Pfizer cannot be trusted to accurately or transparently shed any light on this. And what of Cuba’s non-mRNA vax? Now compare side effects.
Tommy_Q are you actually serious regarding Cuba’s ineffective non-mRNA Vax ???? Talk about PROVING a non-starter, failed BS effort which ended up as total nonsense effort.
Did you know Cuba back door-ed the J & J Covid-19 Vax ?? Guess not. Did you know Cuba ended up ‘accepting’ Moderna RNA Vaxes ??? I didn’t think so … Your discredited comments have been dully noted and now go back to your rubber room and consume your prescribed medicine.
CIA Bot…
Why don’t you show evidence of how you disagree with his statement?
I read the first paragraph, stopped and I didn’t bother to finish reading the balance of the article. Frankly, if one starts out by believing the propaganda that ‘China has had 15,000 deaths from Covid’ – for me – this is like reading some MSM BS nonsense. Fair.org – you can do FAR better.
There is no reason not to believe that the official numbers reported by China are more or less accurate.
For one, if your implication here is that somehow there has been a death toll far greater than 15,000 (which would require an intricate hush-up conspiracy and complacency of multiple agents failing to report the death of family members, the vanishing of those bodies, and the complete cooperation of friends and family domestic and abroad) then you’d better invest in tin foil for all those hats you’re going to need!
So with just under 1.5 billion people and by virtually all accounts, the source of the pandemic, do you really believe only 15,000 people died in China just because the Chinese government said so ? One would think the author had some skepticism if he is a bona fide journalist. Need I remind you and do you recall NYS Governor Cuomo, out right lied by fudging (errrr concealing) NYS’s Health Depart. nursing home death numbers by over 4,100+ people ?? Need I state that China is an authoritarian country that manages all aspects of their media ?? Should I remind you the Trump admin and the CDC lied about countless aspects of Covid19 ?? It troubling and never would I have imagined so many people here are that naive or uninformed.
Yea, interesting and guess what. There are a fair (no pun intended) amount of people here that will believe anything that’s published – as long as – it’s not from the US government or the MSM. We are talking zero critical analysis. Go figure.
Just because the US government repeatedly lies about most of its activities and their effects does not mean that every other government’s official statistics are never true. Your logic is poor. If you have good-quality, independent evidence that the Chinese government’s vigorous, popular public health measures against a potentially lethal pandemic did not protect its people, and that the death toll was substantially higher, please provide links to it.
Without evidence, your claim falls. It’s over to you, Mr Carlin and Mr Roberts.
So then, Mr Roberts, on what grounds do you base your claim that the figure of 15,000 deaths in China from Covid-19 is false? Should it be lower? Please show your working, i.e. the independent research that shows a different number of excess deaths due to this virus. Without that, you are merely peddling Sinophobia.
If there was any evidence that the Chinese numbers were inaccurate, the media would be trumpeting it from the rooftops. Since they instead avoid the subject entirely, I presume that no such evidence is available.
You are basically saying “I hate China, therefore any fact showing China to have done something well just MUST be false, because the world couldn’t possibly make me feel bad by letting someone I hate succeed at anything!”
. . . I got some bad news for you. That’s not how the world works.
Please don’t put words in my mouth and I got news for you regarding how the world works.
What I am stating is ANY and ALL people in power lie in a continuing effort to stay in power. For those of you who think Western leaders are the only power centers who lie, I got a bridge to sell you. As touched on prior there seem to be an abundance of naive folks here.
Great, now present your evidence that Chinese govt officials have lied and post the actual figures please!
WRONG – You disprove it. (Lots of bots here, clean this up FAIR)
Riley
Maybe you should learn to read?
Or maybe you enjoy discrimination articles because your some guy who has a superiority complex.
Maybe you should speak respectfully. Maybe you should listen. Maybe you should read about topic with multiple view points. Beijing has already decided it makes more sense to live with COVID and rising CO2 levels than combat either of them. A surrender of sorts. If you read anything of substance you might understand that the ancient Chinese curse about living in interesting times is striking again.
Oh right, but you take at face value as gospel that there are millions of Uighurs imprisoned and tortured there. On the basis of what, exactly?
Off topic but here you go.
The source is a long-awaited August 2022 report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) into what China refers to as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR)
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/08/1125932
Pay attention to this highlighted statement from the “May constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.”
Yeks, just drop the mike thing thing and that shut Tom_Q_Collins down. Good work Riley, as one of my distant relative lives in the NW Autonomous region and has been struggling greatly. Interesting, as for some reason, this thread brought out so much vitriol on this article and topic.
I live in Beijing and have lived in this city over 20 years. I was here during the SARS epidemic years back and I’ve been here. Beijing has been especially careful with Covid as it’s not only the most important city the country, it’s like a Rome and anything that happens anywhere in China is likely to make it’s way here. As for zero Covid, it can be onerous to some especially if you have to undergo a full lockdown and stay at home for days at a time, even weeks. It’s also bad luck to be in the travel or food and lodging industry as travel has been sharply curtailed. That’s never happened to us although the section of our building next door was locked down for three days as one of the residents on that set of stairs was exposed to a virus outbreak somewhere in the city. We are limited in travel. Not because we can’t but if there’s an outbreak where we go, it would be be a big pain getting back into Greater Beijing and since Greater Beijing is the size of a small US state, there are plenty of places we can go to here if we want a rural/country environment. We are all fully innoculated and over sixty. The vaccines were free of charge and we do get tested for the virus every three days (for free) but only if we expect to enter stores and or take public transportaton and we are expected to wear masks if we do. All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty small price to pay for staying alive. I haven’t even had a decent cold in the last three years and I put that down to wearing a mask in public. Anyway, sure glad I’m here and not anywhere close to the NYTs, Mike Liston
Oh yea, its just a lovely, freedom loving country. Me think – you – are a Chinese XI troll / bot.
Whoa, that’s off topic. Next time someone says that China lost very few people to COVID, will you complain that that misses their inability to win tiddlywinks championships? No, it’s not a freedom loving country. It doesn’t even claim to be a freedom loving country. But the fact is, its zero Covid strategy has resulted in real close to zero Covid, a massive success compared to . . . almost everyone else, and PARTICULARLY the United States.
Do you have evidence that Mr Liston is lying? If not, stop making allegations without anything to back them up. That itself is the kind of act typical of trolls.
This is coming from an Indian who has been conquered by white Britains.
Can you have some backbone?
You are a ignorant, name calling, racist bully who clearly has an axe to grind. Who appointed you site monitor and the most virtuous person on the site ? Go away troll.
Thank you, Mr. Jim Naureckas for your fact based, well articulated analysis on NYT’s “news” and providing background facts/perspective on the subject.
It’s a pity that MSM like NYT, keeps rolling out distorted reports on China to its American/English-speaking audiances. It’s sad that MSM like NYT are the main resource of knowledge/information on foreign countries for most of its readers:
Reports like NYT’s serve the function of distorting the American people/English media audience’s understanding of other countries, and spreading hate/bigotry/fear…; do they really think it’s beneficary for American people to think EVERYTHING happens in other countries are either “backwards” or “suppressive” or with evil intentions? does it make USA better? does it make the world better? The distortions in the MSM reports are so uniform that makes one wonder if they follow some kind of common guidelines when reporting/publishing stories on China. a guideline that’s pushing for conflict, for hatred, to manufacture consent for war or justify its sponsor’s policies/conducts.
there should be more objective, balanced reporting/analysis like yours today.
For the corporate media, as for our capitalist rulers, mass deaths are an easily acceptable price to pay for keeping the workers producing the wealth those rulers rake in every day of the year. Thank you for your insight which is so much more informative than the rubbish peddled by that media and by some Sinophobic commenters here.
I’m a worker. I do not want the government locking me up in my home for weeks on end.
I’m sick of the paternalistic, technocrat-minded elite claiming to want to “protect” me. Hiding in a hole is bad for your immune system.
Good thing for you that you have a decent immune system and that you don’t have any immunocompromised relatives that are forced to interact with you.
Precisely how many of your friends and family died of COVID-19? I can barely count the number of mine on two hands.
P.S. Clearly the NYT shares your opinion, at least in comparison to China. Guess you don’t really have a problem with the elite legacy media unless they disagree with you or the YouTube influencers from whom you get your commentary and news.
Chinese Americans working in journalism or government are usually extremely anti-China. One of the reasons is the fact that anti-China sells newspapers and earn votes. And China bashing articles is the only way for these Chinese American journalists to gain recognition and promotion. In a way, Her article reflect the racism inside the New York Times. Fair assessment of China will not see the light of day at the times. But this is everywhere even in NPR, not just the times. And it is hard to say who smears China the craziest, democrats or republicans.
The CCP cares about lives, HAHAHAHA! They only care about staying in POWER and are deathly afraid of their own citizens. Lockdowns harm children the most, my wife has seen it first-hand at day care. And the reason the US had so many deaths is because most are OBESE, major Covid death risk factor. And who knows, maybe this BIO-WEAPON was created to hit people with European ancestry the hardest and Han Chinese the least.
Who knows, Mr Dragovich – certainly not you with your unsubstantiated allegations lifted from Fox News and other organs of the far Right. The evidence is clear: the popular and vigorous actions against this potentially lethal virus instituted in China with the mass and willing participation of the people have been enormously successful in reducing the death rate to almost zero. As for the USA with its capitalist, laissez-faire, let the virus run free policies: so far around a million dead and counting. I know which government acts for its own people’s safety. Which of the two has ever imprisoned a billionaire, by the way? I think you’ll find it’s not the USA.
About 28,000 people die every day in China from complications of conditions like diabetes and heart disease, which lockdowns exacerbate.
Why isn’t Sweden #1 for covid deaths if lockdowns do more good than harm?
Why is hard-lockdown Peru so high for covid deaths?
Mikel
Excuses, excuses
1 million deaths
The mere fact, you mentioned bioweapon means your as dumb as a brick.
Science has already proven it was not created.
Some people are just dumb, it’s amazing how many people are like this.
The key point in all this is that China’s economic hardship has consequences for the world economy and therefore, Americans. That is why these articles are slanted towards the dubious tragedy of saving lives but slowing down supply chains.
So you think only 15,000 people died in China, the source of the epidemic with a population of what, a billion and a half? Well, if the Chinese government says so, I guess it certainly must be true. I wonder how you manage to function as a journalist with as little skepticism as this. China is an authoritarian state that can clamp down on information as easily as it can lock down huge segments of its population. All governments lie, even [especially?] China’s. Expressing skepticism at a whopper like the number of dead China has reported does not make you racist or even anti-Chinese. It just means that you didn’t turn off your bullshit detector trying to prove that you’re “woke.”
Scepticism is at the heart of science. You are expressing cynicism based on your experience of the capitalist system in the West and its corporate media. If you have counter evidence, show it. If not, you have literally no reason to doubt the accuracy of the death rate in China.
The government officially endorses and spends billions on “traditional Chinese medicine.” So yes, we should be skeptical of any country that embraces such pseudoscience.
Michael
Once again, your are so dumb.
TCM – East
vitamins – west
It’s the same practice.
TCM prevention
Vitamins prevention
OMG how??
Vitamins are made by living things, while minerals are found in the earth. For example, carrots produce beta carotene, which the body turns into vitamin A; minerals, such as iron and copper, can be found in soil and rock
TCM….uses the same concept.
Duh
Critical analysis and skepticism is at the heart of any sensible journalist or publication which pertains to the entire world. Taking face value statements or data points from any authoritarian country, any Western country or Western MSM outlets is pure foolishness. Your clear anti Western bias at all costs reveals a level of dumbassery that is truly staggering in my view.
Richard where is your evidence?
Oxford independent studies already verified China numbers….
I guess independent study by a western organization is not good enough.
I guess you also believe the earth is flat when one of the democrats or republicans believe it.
As if actual EVIDENCE has any meaning to you. You troll.
Sure, if all you care about is biological survival, China’s strategy is the better one. Staying locked up for the next 20 years would be even better. Less Covid, right?
Most people want more from life than a beating heart and 15 breaths per minute. I’m neither American nor Chinese, but would unquestionably choose the US over China as a place to live.
Because your white person
Most white people would choose a white country to live in.
Common sense….
Meanwhile a Chinese would choose to….I don’t know live with other Chinese societies.
Canceled – you racist bastard.
I’m British. I can see which nation is declining and which is progressing.
“China’s life expectancy is now higher than that of the US.
The US’s life expectancy continued its decline from 2020 to 2021, dropping sharply to 76.1 years. With the latest decline, US life expectancy is now at its lowest since 1996, according to new data (pdf) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) National Center for Health Statistics. It also means that the gap in longevity at birth between people in the US and China has now widened to a full year.
The biggest driver in the drop in US life expectancy is covid, accounting for 50% of the decline, according to the CDC. Government figures show that as of Aug. 31, over 1.04 million deaths in the US have been attributed to covid.
“Unintentional injuries”—which include opioid overdoses and motor vehicle crashes—were the second-largest contributor to the drop in life expectancy, making up 15.9% of the decline.
Chinese data on life expectancy for 2021 is not yet available. Remarkably, however, Chinese life expectancy actually increased by 0.2 years in 2020 from the year prior. By contrast, US life expectancy fell 1.8 years in 2020 over the same period.”
https://qz.com/china-life-expectancy-exceeds-us-1849483265
I’m American and I cannot wait to gtf out of this country. Homeless camps, gun violence, general violence, unaffordable housing, unaffordable medical care, massive inflation.
We shouldn’t take healthcare cues from a country that relies on rhino horn and tiger penises to “treat” covid.
“TCM [traditional chinese medicine] has played a positive role in Covid-19 prevention and treatment.”
http://www.newschinamag.com/newschina/articleDetail.do?article_id=7096§ion_id=13&magazine_id=78
Michael we know based on your posts your a racist person against Asians.
You just hitting elderly Asians in America or busy claiming “All lives matter”
Meanwhile this is how dumb you are. Do you know vitamins is a form of TCM?????
OMG….you must be dumb.
Because it’s a vitamin your okay but when a culture practices vitamin in a natural setting, you cry about it.
Maybe if you spent more time with education, you wouldn’t sound so dumb.
Telling multiple people on this thread they must be miserable and dumb is obviously a transference of your own state of mind. Someday you may feel better about yourself and able to contribute something meaningful. Until then, continue resist the urge, stay off this site but continue to take your medicine.
—– here again with the latest.
LISTEN.
When our collective NPD fails, the state might fail.
The End.
This is ‘the’ (yes the) rational debate about global politics.
Our message is simple : Narcissistically compete, Narcissistically hate,
Narcissistically love, Narcissistically debate, Narcissistically politic the body, and democratically force the body politic, Narcissistically defend ourselves, Narcissistically lie, Narcissistically cheat..
… on and on and on… and we save the world again.
….. We got them all doing it. All the magazines.
You know why they called us reptilian shapeshifters in the old world ??? Huh ?? Because we are highly evolved actors. We, the great politicians of the great Greek myth of Metals.
In a single breath, our act defines reality. That’s how good we are at it…. until recently getting called out by this whole “woke fair tribe” .. we were almost outshined by the occupy movement.
I’ll leave you with this gem,
The success of the state depends on our collective NPD. Standard issue government propaganda, at it’s best.
That’s why the gop supported Stop the Steal!
And to prove it again, I’ll leave you with this other gem…
Look at the death toll in China, and the death toll in the USA.. Who was lower ?? We Won!
(Satirical Commons)
Another lie that mainstream western media concocted is about the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines and Western vaccines. Western media claimed that their vaccines are superior than the Chinese one, but I live in Indonesia, where we mostly use Chinese vaccines in the early stage. Sure, Chinese vaccines didn’t stop people from getting infected, but neither did western vaccines like pfizer and moderna. So what is the different? Why western propaganda media claimed that western vaccines are superior when at the end they don’t prevent people from catching the virus?
What Chinese vaccines did was saving a lot of lives. My own family caught covid, and thank god they are vaccinated using Chinese vaccine, or I didn’t dare to imagine what could happen. I lost an aunt who died of covid before the vaccine is available. If we have to wait for the western vaccines that came so late, the number of deaths would have been tremendous. The west prioritized their own countries first to get the vaccine, which I have no complained about it, but China helped us a lot by sending the vaccines so early. By the time western vaccines arrived, most of our people are already vaccinated. Disgustingly, probably to save face, the western propaganda media begun to spread the rumor that the Chinese vaccines don’t work.