Most people probably support China's ongoing COVID lockdowns even if they won't admit it
Reflecting on the new rules of the world
It is easy to forget that China is still doing the COVID lockdown thing, but they are—aggressively, proactively, almost more so than they were two-and-a-half years ago:
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. …
At least 65 million Chinese are currently under some form of lockdown, according to a tally by Chinese media, including the southwestern city of Chengdu, home to 21 million people. In cities that are not battling outbreaks, quashing Covid still dictates the rhythms of daily life. Residents line up for mandatory, regular testing and obsessively monitor their health codes, digital markers that dictate whether they can move freely.
That does indeed sound miserable. It does not sound anomalous. In fact, it sounds like China is pretty much just sticking to the rules that nearly everyone in the entire world decided on in the early spring of 2020, namely that avoiding and “completely eradicating” COVID is the primary purpose of every level of government, society and life. It cannot be overemphasized how strongly pretty much everyone came to believe this seemingly overnight, including nearly all major world leaders, civic authorities, clergy, clerics, jurists, grocers, neighbors, YouTube content creators—everyone got on board with it.
You may not remember the specific rules of the new COVID regime, but they essentially ran something like this:
COVID is a unique and horribly deadly disease that can and does kill people indiscriminately and we will have to be vigilant against for the rest of our lives.
It is uniquely deadly toward the most vulnerable in society—elderly, sick and/or immunocompromised people—and therefore we must take the strictest and most exacting precautions to ensure it does not infect any one of them.
If you do anything that might possibly result in even one infection and death, somewhere, anywhere, at any time, no matter how obliquely—i.e., if you inadvertently infect a woman at the grocery store, who then infects her brother, who then infects his coke dealer, who then infects his dry cleaner, who then infects her grandmother, who then dies—then you are directly and morally responsible for that death.
There are no negative externalities too extreme for COVID mitigation measures. Crushing isolation, mental illness, economic collapse, education catastrophes, the wrecking of huge portions of everything we love and treasure about our societies and our lives—all of it is dispensable in the quest to eradicate COVID. Nothing else matters, only stopping COVID.
Yes, it was this bad. You remember it now. Everyone professed these things. And so the surprising thing isn’t that China is still doing brutal COVID lockdowns—it’s that the rest of the world stopped doing them. If you ascribe to the beliefs above, when would you ever stop? What changed for the rest of us?
You can point to the vaccines as the game-changer that shifted this paradigm in a measurable way, but of course they didn’t confound any of the above factors, not really. The vaccines are pretty bad at stopping infections—they’re what virologists call “leaky”—and among populations the elderly and the sick are still uniquely vulnerable to COVID. It is still entirely possible that if you go out to the grocery store—even if you’re quadruple-vaxxed and you wear a wet cotton strip across your face while you’re doing it!—you may start off an infectional chain reaction that eventually terminates with old elderly Mildred Dunlop at Starry Oaks Nursing Home. You could easily be infecting and killing old people and cancer patients left and right, every time you leave the home. You might be a mass murderer for all you know. Nothing’s really changed. Why does nobody care about that anymore?
The simplest and most likely explanation is that people don’t care because they’ve been told not to care. Our leaders told us 36 months ago that we had to re-orient our entire lives, indefinitely, to conform to a destructive, paranoid, fear-filled risk analysis about a virus, so most people did; now they see it as more advantageous to tell us not to, so most people obeyed that order, too. Yet COVID is still here, old people are still getting it and getting sick and dying, cancer patients still have to worry about getting infected and dying every time they go out. The original impetus for Chinese-style lockdowns is still very much with us and always will be.
So China isn’t abnormal. In effect they’re just playing by the same rules that essentially the whole world agreed upon a few years ago. If you were afraid in early 2020 that you might inadvertently infect and kill someone, but you’re not afraid of that now, you’re making a political calculus, not an objective or scientific one—COVID still exists, it’s still killing people, and you could easily still be helping facilitate those deaths.
If you were a COVID lockdown fanatic two years ago, your two choices at this point would seem to be (1) advocate a return to indefinite, society-wide lockdowns in order to stop all COVID transmission, or (2) admit that you were wrong in early 2020, that the rules you believed in were very bad and very destructive, and that you allowed yourself to be hoodwinked by hysteria, paranoia, corruption and anti-scientific claptrap. The second option isn’t easy; the first gets you Communist China.
The great and probably accurate fear, of course, is that more people are comfortable with being Communist China than they are admitting that they were wrong. This is the way things are now. The world has changed, for the worse.
At the very beginning, there was universal fear, quite naturally, and then the blissful 30 days (or was it 30 minutes?) that the country really did feel 'we're all in this together' and there was harmony and concern for neighbors and people competent with sewing machines making thousands of masks, etc. But so quickly it still amazes me, the issue became totally polarized and it was along political lines. If you believed in universal masking, social distancing, closing of businesses, and a reckless rush to develop a 'vaccine', you were a Democrat, and if you felt otherwise, you were Republican or possibly Libertarian. Why was this so? To me it is the single most confounding question of the last couple of years. I can imagine dozens of scenarios where things could have been different; they all involve listening to ALL the experts, ALL the research from decades ago until now, all the successes in treatments that reputable, experienced front-line doctors were reporting, and that small but insistent voice in each of us that MUST have said, at some point, 'this can't be right.' Figuring out exactly why this did not happen seems to be an important task of the next 10 or 20 years.