zhang.dianli

By now everybody in the world has heard of the massive COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai. You know, the one that gives us a graph that's been repeated in many different forms that looks roughly like this:

Of course the press being the press there is a major problem with this graph: it is utterly devoid of context. In that image there it looks like some seriously scary shit is going down in Shanghai (and, honestly, there is some seriously scary shit going down in Shanghai!). But this graph is being used in service of a narrative that is flatly false: Zero Covid Doesn't Work.

The Press' lies and its consequences

So before we fall prey to the press' wild exaggerations (a polite way of saying “lies”), let's supply a bit of context, shall we?

Suddenly that “scary” “spike” in Shanghai barely registers as a rounding error compared to the day to day reality of a bunch of western nations. (Selection criterion for those nations: these are nations where I have family, friends, and acquaintances I interact with regularly).

Ever since the press lies (oops!—I meant “wild exaggerations”!) started, I've had family and friends asking me if I'm OK because they're worried for me with this “huge” outbreak. I keep having to point out to them that I'm safer than they are even if I were living in Shanghai. So hell-bent are the press on forcing the “Zero-Covid doesn't work” horseshit that friends and relatives who are at tremendously greater risk than I will ever be are worried for me instead of themselves!

So what's the reality?

The reality is that by Chinese standards Shanghai's outbreak and their handling of the same are shockingly inept. I predict that, as happened in Wuhan in January 2020, the leadership of Shanghai will be mass-sacked and many will likely be expelled from the Party with several higher figures jailed (or, as persistent rumours about the former mayor of Wuhan keep saying, executed) for gross incompetence and misconduct.

The reality is that Shanghai is an outlier, and they're an outlier precisely because they didn't follow the examples set down by the cities you never heard of ... precisely because “big city stomps COVID-19 before case count exceeds two digits” isn't headline news material. Had Shanghai followed sane procedures done by cities like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, even Beijing (and, if you hold your nose, Dalian), this outbreak would have been stopped dead in its tracks in the low four-figure case count tops.

And if they'd gone like Wuhan they wouldn't have even broken into 3 figures.

So Wuhan did well, then?

Yes.

When the big outbreak started in Shanghai, cities across China went on high alert. Shanghai is a major commercial hub and people travel to and from Shanghai in every major city (and most minor cities) in the country. Wuhan was no exception.

Wuhan has at all points of ingress testing stations set up. If you've come in from an at-risk location (previously, for example, it was Shenzhen), you are tested on the spot with test results that are guaranteed to be ready in 24 hours. Anybody who'd been in Shanghai in the past week, when the news broke, got tested on entry.

And they caught three asymptomatic cases.

That was on a Thursday evening that the results came out. By Friday morning everybody in Wuhan was required to get tested. Everybody. In a city of 11 million people. Tested in a day. By Saturday the asymptomatic cases caught had climbed to 10. Under the emergency regulations the populace was to be tested in its entirety every 48 hours. If you didn't have negative test results within a 48-hour period, you were banned from public transit (they check!), from grocery stores and shopping centres (they check!) and generally your life is hemmed in. You don't have to get checked. If you want to stay at home and do nothing, nobody cares. But for those with jobs and those who want to buy little things like, you know, food, you needed testing done.

Of course a testing mandate really only works if testing is freely available and convenient. That's the other genius of their system. Testing stations are everywhere. (I get tested at the medical centre in my work compound, but I could get tested in my residential compound, or in any number of street clinics for testing, or in any other residential compound, or ...) You get in line (outdoors, not indoors, and with mandatory distancing), you wait a few minutes (the longest wait I ever had was the first one at 20 minutes), you get your QR code scanned if you're Chinese, or some personal information entered (basically passport number and telephone number), and then you get your throat swabbed.

Test over.

Within 24 hours your health app is updated with your test results and you're free to go anywhere for 48 hours. You've taken a few minutes out of every second day and ...

What were Wuhan's results then?

Well, as I said, on Friday (2022-04-08) there were three known asymptomatic cases. By Saturday this was 10 cases. By Monday it was this:

To explain the numbers, the first number is new symptomatic cases. (Zero.) The second is new asymptomatic cases. (Twelve.) The third is total active symptomatic cases. (Zero.) The final number is the recovered cases. (That number is pretty huge because, well, COVID-19 ground zero.)

On Tuesday (which I sadly didn't snap a screenshot of) the first three numbers were 0 7 0 respectively. Culminating in today's numbers:

It's instructive to compare this with Shanghai's numbers for today:

Shanghai isn't proof that “ZOMG ZERO COVID DOESN'T WORK!!!!!111oneoneoneeleventyone!”. It's proof that Zero Covid works fine since only a single city, the city that thinks it's somehow special and different and thus able to get away with (almost literally) half-assing COVID mitigation, got hit hard by an outbreak since the initial outbreak in Wuhan in 2020. (There were some scary countryside issues, to be fair, in the latter half of 2020, but those got squelched too.)

Summary

The Zero COVID-19 strategy works. How do I know?

• Omicron BA.2 came.
• We saw it.
• WE KICKED ITS MOTHERFUCKING ASS!

Just like plain 'ol Omicron and Delta before it.