By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
The Chinese government is adjusting how it reports the
country’s coronavirus cases: “China’s National Health Commission said on
Tuesday that 1,541 asymptomatic coronavirus patients were under observation as
of the end of Monday, with 205 of those cases having come from overseas. A
Chinese health official said separately on Tuesday the commission would start
reporting on asymptomatic cases from Wednesday as fears grow that coronavirus
carriers displaying no symptoms could be spreading the virus without knowing
they are sick.”
You probably heard about China’s closing the country’s
movie theaters shortly after reopening them. You probably have not heard that
similar re-closings are occurring at public buildings in Shanghai.
Shanghai’s skyscrapers – Shanghai
Tower, Shanghai Oriental Pearl Tower, and Jinmao Tower – will temporarily close
again starting Monday after reopening for 19 days.
Earlier, the Shanghai Oriental
Pearl Tower, Shanghai History Museum were reopened on March 12.
In addition, Shanghai Haichang
Ocean Park, Madame Tussauds Shanghai, and other indoor sightseeing and entertainment
attractions have also been suspended. . . .
Entertainment venues such as KTV
and internet cafes have also been suspended in many places of China outside
Shanghai, Chinanews reported.
China has closed its borders to all foreign nationals, the
soccer leagues don’t know when the season will restart, the national university
entrance exam is pushed back to July and Beijing is barring residents of Hubei
province who don’t have a job or a residence registry in the capital.
And then there’s this not-yet-fully-explained phenomenon:
From March 18-22, the Chinese city
of Wuhan reported no new cases of the virus through domestic transmission —
that is, infection passed on from one person to another. The achievement was
seen as a turning point in efforts to contain the virus, which has infected
more than 80,000 people in China. Wuhan was particularly hard-hit, with more
than half of all confirmed cases in the country.
But some Wuhan residents who had
tested positive earlier and then recovered from the disease are testing
positive for the virus a second time. Based on data from several quarantine
facilities in the city, which house patients for further observation after
their discharge from hospitals, about 5%-10% of patients pronounced “recovered”
have tested positive again.
Some of those who retested positive
appear to be asymptomatic carriers — those who carry the virus and are possibly
infectious but do not exhibit any of the illness’s associated symptoms —
suggesting that the outbreak in Wuhan is not close to being over.
NPR has spoken by phone or
exchanged text messages with four individuals in Wuhan who are part of this
group of individuals testing positive a second time in March.
Does this sound like a country of a billion people that
has only a couple dozen new cases per day, as the official numbers state?
When you see headlines along the lines of, “The United
States isn’t handling the coronavirus any better than China,” keep in mind that
the Chinese government embraced brutal totalitarian measures that the American
people would never accept. Chinese authorities welded doors shut to keep the
infected from leaving their homes. (Video here.)
What if the only effective way to slow the spread of the
virus is to take measures that are absolutely catastrophic for a country’s
economy? And what if China endured the lockdown conditions for as long as the
country’s economy could bear — just short of the extreme conditions that could
prompt a revolt against the current regime — and then reopened the factories,
hoping that a second wave of the coronavirus wouldn’t be too harmful?
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