China abandoned its zero-COVID program in December 2022 and travel restrictions were lifted. Quarantines are over. Testing was halted, even COVID-related data collection was stopped, and victory was declared.
Many Western pundits, taking things literally, expected an economic boom. A February 2023 article in The Economist titled “What pandemic?China’China. The ultra-rapid economic recovery, they said, “has returned in full force. “The authors say they see “evidence of a strangely immediate recovery in intake in the world’s second-largest economy,” a trend so strong that “the country’s reopening will spur global growth, perhaps uncomfortably. “
It is true that the concrete clues were incomplete. The Economist cited record attendance at a (ambiguous?) mausoleum and long queues to take the cable cars at a popular tourist site. (This is not a typical measure of economic performance. )Much of the optimism was based on “exceptionally liquid” prestige. of Chinese households, with savings exceeding 100 percent of the country’s GDP, supposedly on the verge of triggering a “spending boom. “The enthusiastic narrative described the “frenetic pace” of the “revenge spending”; a “frenzy”; and a “madness that will be a welcome contribution to global growth. “
Tributes to China’s marvelous expansion engine flooded the media. Freed from the zero-COVID cage, the Chinese economy would return to normal. Even the other sober people at the Federal Reserve have accepted it.
BusinessWeek’s contribution titled “Welcome: China Joins the Party. “It would also be good news for the rest of us: “the easing of COVID-related restrictions may simply be the spice that the declining global economy needs. “
[A passing remark: an accumulation of savings is not considered a sign of economic health, as economists since Keynes have realized. See Martin Wolf’s comment in the Financial Times of March 5 this year: “China’s excessive savings are a danger. “. “]
In any case, after a few months, it has become clear that the expected recovery is not happening.
The end of COVID-0 is not the end of COVID. In China, infections have skyrocketed, affecting more than a billion people in just a few weeks. No other country has seen so many COVID cases in such a short time. The fitness formula is absolutely overwhelmed. And as a June 2023 report in the journal Nature warned:
To assess the full medical, social, and economic impact of the pandemic in China, one will first need to understand the true cost of the Chinese population. Massive outbreaks in other countries (e. g. , New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong) after the end of zero-COVID policies offer analogies to what China is experiencing, but the momentum there is much greater and more intense.
How much bigger? It’s hard to say. The Chinese government’s COVID statistics are “useless” (according to The Economist’s assessment), for the reasons outlined in the previous column. But other government insights can be used to estimate the true number of deaths, at least to a moderate extent.
How many Chinese died? The accounts and the UN diverge.
Beijing’s message is triumphalist.
In addition-
China’s active suppression of COVID knowledge allows it to answer this question directly. Incidental knowledge resources (such as sudden and acute shortages of prescription drugs or satellite photographs of congested roads and masses of parking near funeral homes and crematoriums in Chinese cities) recommend the scale of the problem. But they don’t easily translate into accurate numerical estimates.
Analysts have used three main approaches to assess the actual effect of COVID on China.
This is the simplest and arguably the most compelling approach. It is based entirely on official figures from the Chinese government.
Mortality rates are sometimes very stable. Today, in most countries, the crude all-cause mortality rate increases as the population ages. “Excess mortality” is explained as a significant upward deviation from the long-term trend.
Starting in 2019, China experienced a sudden and significant inflection in the crude death rate. The average annual rate of accumulation over several years is fivefold and remains high.
Crude Mortality Rates in China 2009-2023
The four-year total, from 2019 to 2022, amounts to about 1. 6 million additional deaths (2023 added another 800,000 “excess deaths” above the pre-COVID baseline).
Excess deaths in China 2019-2022
The Economist magazine has designed excess mortality very well and with technical sophistication. In July 2023, his style produced estimates of between 560,000 and 3. 7 million excess deaths in China, with a central “best estimate” of just under 2 million deaths (roughly in line with my estimate provided above).
Excess mortality in China 2020-2023, according to The Economist magazine model
The most recent assessment of excess mortality comes from an August 24, 2023, Journal of the American Medical Association article.
In summary, it is clear that COVID-19 has hit China hard, starting in 2019 and persistently for the past four years. The crude death rate has skyrocketed, reflecting millions of deaths that are “excesses” of the overall long-term trend. .
This technique is based on infection and mortality rates observed in other (“comparable”) countries where knowledge about COVID is more comprehensive and of higher quality. These rates are then implemented in the Chinese population to get an estimate of the most likely impact.
Strong comparables would combine: (1) a cultural and ethnic background; (2) economic systems; (3) zero-COVID regimens; and (4) more reliable data.
Hong Kong is the most productive comparison case. The city maintained a zero-COVID regime (albeit less strict than the mainland) until February 2022, when it overtook Omicron. In March 2022, the British Medical Journal wrote:
In the 12 months since the collapse of the 0-COVID regime in Hong Kong, the cumulative number of COVID deaths in Hong Kong has increased by more than 6,000%, from 213 to 13,370. (The same period was 22 percent. ) This is a testament to the catastrophic effect of the Omicron variant on an ill-prepared population. This underscores the return to 0 of the reported daily death rate in China after March 2023. epidemiologically impossible. Applying Hong Kong’s death rate of 184 COVID deaths compared to another 100,000 people to China’s population of around 1. 4 billion would result in an estimate of around 2. 5 million deaths, which is in line with the excess mortality figures cited above.
A Stanford University study modeled the number of deaths in China from reports from Hong Kong and Korea, resulting in lower estimates: “987,455 and 619,549 peak COVID-19 deaths, respectively, assuming the entire Chinese population is infected. “Reports imply that infection rates among the Chinese population reached between 80 and 90% a few weeks after the lifting of zero-COVID in December 2022.
However, there are significant differences between China and even its closest comparable countries, which portends a more severe impact for China. These aggravating factors include:
Ultimately, estimates based on the “comparable” technique are roughly in line with estimates based on excess mortality and are five to 30 times higher than the official COVID death count released through the Chinese government.
COVID rates for China can also be estimated from various publicly available resources that partially or indirectly correlate COVID mortality. In February 2023, the New York Times reported on the effects of a number of other modeling approaches, which converged by about 1 million. to 1. 5 million Chinese deaths by the end of 2022, and before the actual effect wipes out COVID-0 (again in line with the excess mortality estimates explained in the previous section). A study conducted by China extrapolated the Shanghai outbreak in the spring of 2022 and an estimated 1. 6 million deaths through mid-2023.
Airfinity, a fitness insights analysis group, estimated 600,000 deaths in the first month after the lifting of 0 COVID (ten times China’s official figure at the same time) and 1. 7 million deaths through April 2023. The Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and the assessment predicts about 300,000 deaths in China between the end of 0-COVID and the first quarter of 2023. (This model was widely criticized for being subject to significant underestimates for many countries, and the update was “paused” at the end of 2022. ), its final forecast is 100 percent higher than official Chinese figures).
And as previously reported, The Economist’s COVID death toll is around 2 million (central estimate) in July 2023, up 1,500% from the official death toll.
China’s 0-COVID policy meant 0 COVID reports. Data suppression began very early and instinctively and became the consistent official policy in April 2020. It hasn’t literally replaced even after the 0 COVID mandate was lifted in December 2022. “Report Zero” continues to this day. It turns out that even the maximum fundamental knowledge is no longer collected.
Taking into account the anomalies in raw mortality figures, infection rates and fatality rates show incredibly low numbers for China compared to other countries with demographic and political profiles. The infection rate in Hong Kong is 143 times higher than that reported in China. continent, and the mortality rate is 30 times higher than that reported on the continent.
In particular, China’s incredibly low case fatality rate (CFR) (described in the column above), 33 times lower than Hong Kong’s case fatality rate, is medically inconceivable. The fate of an inflamed user in mainland China cannot have been much different from that of a COVID victim in Hong Kong or elsewhere. In fact, the institutional deficits of the Chinese fitness formula would mean a less effective remedy for COVID patients compared to Hong Kong or Korea.
The number of Chinese dead from COVID was likely between 1. 5 and 2 million as of mid-2023, with estimates as high as 3. 5 million at the top of the scale. The number of people who would become seriously ill would be in the dozens. of millions, putting pressure on the fitness system, diverting resources from productive uses, and crippling the economy. Due to Beijing’s active suppression of key data, it would possibly never be imaginable to fully isolate and quantify the effects of this factor, but it deserves to be considered one of the main contributors to China’s current slowdown.
A delivery driver walks past a shopping mall in a shopping district in Beijing on May 16, 2022. – Retail sales in China fell to their lowest point in two years, while factory production plummeted, according to reports official on May 16, reflecting the dire economic situation. consequences of Beijing’s zero-Covid policy. (Photo via AFP) (Photo via STR/AFP Getty Images)
For information, see Part 1 of this essay, here:
This column is based on an essay commissioned last year through the Heritage Foundation, which can be found at https://www. heritage. org/CTP.
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My second career: In 2003, I joined the Stevens Institute of Technology, where I created and oversaw a number of systems in quantitative finance and similar fields. I’m the Executive Director of the Hanlon Financial Systems Research Center at Stevens. I am also a Co-Principal Investigator of a recently awarded Plans Grant through the National Science Foundation to create a center for cooperative studies between industry and university focused on monetary science and technology. I’m the author of several e-books on wireless technology and my new book is called Price.
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I can be reached by email at gcalhoun@stevens. edu.
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