China Covid Surge Raises Questions About Xi Regime

China’s president, Xi Jinping, may be having second thoughts about lifting the drastic restraints he’d ordered to stop the Covid epidemic after the resulting mass protests morphed into strident demands for the overthrow of his regime.China, where Covid-19 was first detected in Wuhan three years ago, just can’t seem to shake the bug that has swept the planet. The disease seemed to have been more or less under control when authorities reversed course in response not only to violent demonstrations on the streets of Beijing, Shanghai, and a score of other cities, but also to the advice of the Chinese Center for Disease Control.The reversal cut both ways as Mr. Xi and his inner circle sought to make it a propaganda show. What better evidence of the success of the “zero-Covid” policy than the state media boasting that efforts to stamp out the pandemic were working?Now, a quarter of a million Chinese reportedly may have gotten sick just this month as another strain gets around medicines used to wipe out the disease in its initial phases. Authorities appear uncertain what to do while hospitals and clinics are jammed, medicine is scarce, and Covid testing facilities are proving inadequate to deal with another outburst of cases.“To me this looks like an imminent humanitarian tragedy unfolding in China,” a medical professor and dean at the Baylor College of Medicine, Peter Hotez, said. Looking at what’s happening there, he said it’s “like watching the Titanic approach an iceberg.”The scope of the epidemic in China is not clear, as it’s easy to label likely cases as flu or the common cold rather than Covid. In a country of 1.4 billion, authorities found they just could not maintain the stringent quarantines under which they ordered all the people in major cities to stay home.Complicating matters, Chinese health authorities will stop reporting asymptomatic cases, according to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. In fact, said the paper, “many people without symptoms are no longer getting tested.”That decision appears to be another attempt by President Xi to downplay the disease that’s ravaging the country and to avoid imposing yet again the measures that threatened the stability of his regime. Anxious to make the numbers look better, authorities have given up releasing daily statistics on the number of cases.Indeed, the South China Morning Post reported, “compulsory mass PCR testing has been dropped and testing by individuals discouraged.” In other words, if you suffer from fatigue, a headache, and a bit of a cough but that’s about it, forget about going for a test. If you’re completely asymptomatic, you may not be eligible for testing at all.Unlike in America and other Western countries, the exact numbers of cases are almost impossible to find, but the paper said officials had admitted “a discrepancy between actual and reported case numbers since the pandemic rules were relaxed.”The vast majority of Chinese have received China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines, but more than half of them have not had second doses. Moreover, the Chinese vaccines, which it also produces for export, are not regarded as effective as the vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna.The entire Chinese population is on the cusp of a decisive point in the course of the disease. Will it get worse, wiping out ten of millions of people, or will the number of cases level off and finally dwindle? The future of the Xi regime, after he was “elected” two months ago to a third five-year term as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, may hang on the outcome of the current surge.

China Covid Surge Raises Questions About Xi Regime

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