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Notes -
Has anyone been following the scenes in China?
The government has changed the definition of a COVID death, apparently to slice the death statistics after relaxing zero-COVID and cases surge. Omicron emerged last year as it ripped through Africa, and that variant seemed less dangerous (although more contagious) than its ancestors. It's suspected that it could be a subvariant of that. Also worth mentioning that China has ordered its first batch of foreign vaccines from Germany, but only for German expats living in China. Too early to tell and we don't have the full facts yet, but I won't be surprised if the situation is grimmer than the PRC government is willing to disclose.
On the other hand, it's amazing how the western mainstream media has reverted to parroting COVID-regime talking points again, after months of calling zero COVID insane. It reads like they're using it as an excuse to justify bringing back more autocratic measures at home, the coming weeks will be very telling.
I don't know about other Western countries, but at least in Finland, the media is not really as much "reverting to parroting COVID-regime talking points" as it is just putting out an occasional story on China like it would do about any other mid-importance news event, ie. some of the stories might be more extensive than others but it really is not major news compared to Ukraine War and how the European energy crisis shows in Finland and the various struggles inside the rickety government and other such matters.
China giving up the measures really doesn't come off to me as anything beyond the final nail in the Zero-Covid coffin - to those willing to use an openly, nakedly authoritarian country as an example, China was really the last attempt to prove that Zero-Covid is even possible to maintain for an indefinite amount of time (because, really, at this point, what would be the alternate? Vaccines are already here), and it quite evidently isn't. My read is that China has probably been looking for a good narrative to offer a way out of these measures for some time.
At this point it's less that they were willing to continue these measures indefinitely but that they were ironically too successful in keeping Covid out and had to maintain these measures even in the face of possible investor disinterest in investing in a country where anything might be closed completely at a moment's notice, and the anti-measures protest offered as good a narrative as they might get, a sort of a "make me do it" scenario, even if that particular phrase is probably apocryphal.
Of course, at this point Zero Covid is generally treated as a marginalized fringe position anyway. Perhaps not as marginalized and fringe as antivaxxery, but still not the proper position for people following the public opinon (since, again, the proper position for those people is just not caring very much.)
Whatever actual criticisms of China I've seen generally are just of "China bad whatever it does" Cold War 2 stuff, or implicitly contrast China's sudden end of measures with Western process of ramping them out more gently (indeed, one might argue that's what they've done since lockdowns were ended in Spring/Summer 2021 - the vaxx passes were sold as a gentler alternative, after all.) We'll see what happens, of course, though there's no guarantee of accurate reporting from China anyway.
Are you making a formal prediction here, or something else?
I wish we'd gotten some formal acknowledgement from the "if you're not zero-covid you want grandma to die" people that the "sensible position that all sensible people agree on" has reversed.
Because I still see them bring it up when they want to bash anti-lockdown people, blaming their noncompliance for COVID not being eradicated.
But the zerocovidists I mentioned are already fringe, a challenger faction, outside of the normie consensus - now more than ever, of course, but even during the period when there were active COVID measures they tended to be the ones forming organizations like iSage etc, always suspicious that the government is going halfway with measures and planning to drop them for "herd immunity" at any phase. In Finland the local ones have at this point moved on to openly conspiracy-theory speculation on how the Finnish government's policy of only offering the second booster to select groups (over-60s and/or underlying complications, basically) just might be a part of some secretive vaccine study with Finns as a test group for not vaccinating the great majority (with a second booster.)
In this sense, yes, they usually do acknowledge that the "sensible position that all sensible people agree on" has reversed, and state so openly - in other words, that the normie consensus where they don't place themselves has dropped even the insufficient measures enacted and is now barging head-first into permanent Covid apocalypse with mounting amounts of long covid etc.
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