fall 2021: banking system collapse due to evergrande spring 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure winter 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure
To be fair, I was a little too harsh on the third time, since many people and most china watchers were very fatigued by then with the ubiquitous plausibly deniable claims of imminent catastrophe in China which didn’t come to pass at all the first two times. Then when there actually were videos popping up of piles of bodybags, everyone got confused. The first two times were pretty strong evidence that experts of all kinds were popping up all over the place making way overconfident predictions of China’s imminent demise. I don’t know whether those predictions persuaded many intelligence agencies or wall street analyst firms, but many people in open source intelligence got bamboozled and started wising up by the third time. I heard that the worst of it was on twitter (alot of respected china watchers apparently tweet), but I’ve never used or trusted twitter so I’m not the right person to ask about how bad it got there.
It’s a tricky situation. As soon as Hong Kong relaxed its pandemic strategy, excess deaths exploded. Since China followed a similar (and even stricter) pandemic strategy, it seemed inevitable that the same thing would happen (all things being equal) and millions would die with many more millions becoming hospitalized. But all things might not be equal; the circulating strains of covid in China might be less lethal than when Hong Kong relaxed its own pandemic strategy. So, it could go either way.
The real problem here is that China is playing Russian roulette; rather than using more effective vaccines and respirators, its using less effective vaccines and poorly-performing masks instead. The expert consensus seems to correctly identity the vaccine problem but still mostly ignores the mask/respirator issue, as they’ve done throughout the pandemic.
fall 2021: banking system collapse due to evergrande
spring 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure
winter 2022: covid overruns healthcare system, causing mass graves and widespread system failure
To be fair, I was a little too harsh on the third time, since many people and most china watchers were very fatigued by then with the ubiquitous plausibly deniable claims of imminent catastrophe in China which didn’t come to pass at all the first two times. Then when there actually were videos popping up of piles of bodybags, everyone got confused. The first two times were pretty strong evidence that experts of all kinds were popping up all over the place making way overconfident predictions of China’s imminent demise. I don’t know whether those predictions persuaded many intelligence agencies or wall street analyst firms, but many people in open source intelligence got bamboozled and started wising up by the third time. I heard that the worst of it was on twitter (alot of respected china watchers apparently tweet), but I’ve never used or trusted twitter so I’m not the right person to ask about how bad it got there.
It’s a tricky situation. As soon as Hong Kong relaxed its pandemic strategy, excess deaths exploded. Since China followed a similar (and even stricter) pandemic strategy, it seemed inevitable that the same thing would happen (all things being equal) and millions would die with many more millions becoming hospitalized. But all things might not be equal; the circulating strains of covid in China might be less lethal than when Hong Kong relaxed its own pandemic strategy. So, it could go either way.
The real problem here is that China is playing Russian roulette; rather than using more effective vaccines and respirators, its using less effective vaccines and poorly-performing masks instead. The expert consensus seems to correctly identity the vaccine problem but still mostly ignores the mask/respirator issue, as they’ve done throughout the pandemic.