Default win: why China no longer has a coronavirus pandemic

Russian analyst Pavel Luzin questioned the victorious reports about the fight against coronavirus that come from China and are replicated all over the world. He gave convincing evidence, to put it mildly, the premature of such conclusions:

“As I promised, I am trying to deal with the Chinese victory over the coronavirus. Let me emphasize: I consider this problem exclusively in the context of the social system and with a great deal of skepticism. And how can there be without skepticism, if at the February peaks in China 6900 cases were recorded per day (oh, this fetishization of tests), by mid-March - only a few dozen per day, and all subsequent months - from several to several dozen cases, and no one dies from him already?

A kind person, a professional translator helped me with the search for materials in Chinese (by the way, very fragmentary). I'll start from afar:

1) In China, there is still no full accounting of causes of death. So in 2016, about 10 million people died in China, and only 1,743,541 cases were covered by the system of registration of causes of death. The rest just died. For reference: in Russia, the cause of death is established in about 100% of cases. Another example: in 2019 in China in the group of "some infectious and parasitic diseases" a little more than 25 thousand people officially died, with the number of registered cases 10.2 million; and in Russia - about 33 thousand people with the number of cases about 4 million. Of course, in Russia these diseases are treated no worse than in China, and the Chinese get sick no worse than the Russians, only the registration of deaths in China is arranged differently, I would even say - somewhat archaic. And it seems that in China, hospital deaths are most likely classified by underlying causes. And if a person was discharged and he died soon, then, most likely, he will simply become another dead without giving a reason.

2) Getting closer to the problem of coronavirus as a respiratory disease, here's another piece of data from 2016: of the same classified 1.74 million deaths in China alone, 235,768 were due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and another 32041 - from lower respiratory tract infections. For comparison, in Russia in the same year 69 thousand people died from all respiratory diseases. True, a decade earlier, with medicine and accounting, everything was even worse: in 2009, slightly more than 44 thousand deaths from all respiratory diseases in China were officially recorded. So China must be given its due - colossal progress as a result of planned actions based on the low base effect.

3) At the same time, there are about 3.9 million doctors in the whole of China, and in Russia there are about 700 thousand people. Contrast this with the nearly 10-fold difference in population size yourself. Also in China, the provision of citizens with hospital beds is almost 2 times lower than in Russia (4 per 1000 people versus 8 per 1000 people): about 6.5 million versus 1.17 million in absolute terms. Simply put, not everyone has objectively access to medical care in China, although progress is also obvious in comparison with the situation in the late 2000s. - hence the still high role of the so-called. "Traditional medicine".

How did China cope with the main disease of the year with such injections? By the will of the political leadership, this problem was removed from the agenda as no longer relevant within the country. In the outside world, of course, China continues to play the coronavirus.

Witnesses of the "Chinese miracle", of course, can object: what about all these quarantine QR codes or health codes in the WeChat application (Chinese Facebook, Instagram, messenger, payment system and something else in one bottle), disciplined Chinese in masks And so on? In vain, have we all been writing about this like a blueprint since spring? Sorry, but I don’t understand how the WeChat app with 630 million active users in China can claim total reach. How can any application for a smartphone claim totality in China, where only 800 million people out of about 1.4 billion have smartphones? And we are not talking about the quality of the applications themselves, about the stability of their work, about bugs, glitches and other failures. Although, of course, some people used these things.

Yes, the Chinese authorities themselves were at first afraid of the virus and introduced quarantine. Of course, when you have an uncountable total population of people with COPD alone, and is estimated at around 100 million, a new obscure respiratory virus is perceived as a potential natural disaster. But the Chinese quarantine was not supported by "digital totalitarianism" at all, but by quite ordinary ones, we are familiar with - live watchmen (security in residential complexes), of which there are more than 5 million people in the country and who were the main quarantine force: try to leave without reporting, and try to enter.

Plus, of course, the principle of collective responsibility: the neighbors will always knock and give out, if anything, and will do everything so that a person who coughs a little behind the wall, together with household members, does not leave his apartment for two weeks. Only how the spread of the virus stopped inside such LCDs is still a mystery. In general, it is not desirable to be ill publicly in such a social system. How undesirable to be non-Chinese: in the spring there were cases when many African Americans, for example, in Gongzhou, were expelled from rented apartments simply because the Chinese considered them to be the main carriers of the virus. Such is the usual racism.

As for masks, the culture of masks in China is the result of a very bad ecological situation. Smog, fine chemical suspension (what about coal-fired power plants in the country, by the way?), And in some places sandstorms leave little choice. And tens of millions of COPD sufferers say hello. But even here, masks in the context of the coronavirus itself are more of a ritual in nature - somewhere they are, somewhere they are not, someone erases / changes, someone does not. So there is no need to exaggerate, and people are people everywhere.

Of course, the Chinese system is strenuously splashing dust not only with its QR codes, which it proposes to spread to the whole world on a blue eye, and with its discipline. I believe that all these reports, when the authorities allegedly tested the 11 millionth city for the virus in 5 days, are from the same opera. The main thing is to report beautifully and provide visibility of the result where it can be done without stress. Anyone who has worked with Chinese students or faced the world's main cheaters in computer games knows.

As a result of the Chinese quarantine, the virus, of course, has not gone anywhere. And to maintain the bureaucratic and social tone (“in the spring we suffered not in vain, and the party did not make mistakes”), isolated cases of covid in China are still recorded. But by and large, the quarantine gave the Chinese authorities time to comprehend the problem and understand that the coronavirus is not threatened with extinction. It is also possible that there would not have been any quarantine there at all if information about the virus had not very quickly got out into the international space, which is a very unusual situation for Beijing. And here the principle already worked: if you can't prevent it, take the lead.

So the Chinese "victory" over the coronavirus, like the "war" with it, is the result of political decisions, the result of the system's reaction to what was labeled as a problem by the authorities themselves. And now Beijing should watch with satisfaction as the Western world, having fallen into a logical trap, torments itself with the fight against this virus..."