The list of nations who have successfully kept Covid at bay is dwindling. At the beginning of the year China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam and Thailand were all doing pretty well. I am putting to one side the Pacific Islands who have performed exceptionally well but have had to completely isolate themselves to maintain their status. Recently numbers dwindled down to two, China and Taiwan, although Taiwan had a recent incursion of Covid (not delta) that it had to deal to put down to prevention fatigue.
The Guardian has the details:
Since the first coronavirus cases were reported nearly two years ago, China has run a zero-tolerance Covid policy. Its success in preventing the virus from spreading across the vast country serves as a stark contrast to the situations in many western countries. Since last year, fewer than 100,000 cases have been officially recorded, among a population of about 1.4 billion. At least 4,634 have died.
By comparison, the US has reported nearly 46m cases and more than 740,000 deaths. The UK has reported nearly 9m cases and more than 140,000 deaths.
But the policy is intense. For just a handful of cases, measures have included strict border closures, localised lockdowns, travel restrictions, and the mass testing of tens of millions of people. Homebound flights booked by Chinese citizens who live abroad are often cancelled at the last minute.
On Thursday, a high-speed train from Shanghai was ordered to halt midway before arriving in Beijing, after an attendant was identified as a close contact of a Covid-positive patient. All the other 211 passengers onboard were immediately quarantined in designated places.
The steps taken are pretty extreme and include mass testing, halted transportation and local lockdowns. And not the you can have a picnic outdoors with family sort of lockdowns. The Chinese lockdowns are much more brutal and only tolerated because of the state of the relationship between the Chinese Government and its people.
But the moral authority is declining. Again from the Guardian:
“People are starting to wane,” said Prof Chunhuei Chi, the director of Oregon State University’s centre for global health. “As with anywhere in the world we can see dragged into this pandemic for nearly two years, and everywhere we observe pandemic fatigue. That would surely also be affecting Chinese people.”
There is also a growing discussion about alternatives such as coexisting with the virus and dealing with it in other ways.
This graph shows what is happening in the nations I mentioned new case wise. The numbers are new confirmed cases. Admittedly the Chinese population is much larger than New Zealand’s but clearly it is struggling to suppress the virus.
And this graph shows vaccination rates. Singapore has the highest vaccination rate and the highest infection rate. Vaccines by themselves will not resolve matters.
And if you thought Delta was bad there is now a new Delta plus variant. Whoever thought that letting Covid rip through populations thereby giving itself plenty of chances to mutate need to have their head read.
Rachel Sadler at Newshub has this description:
Delta Plus differs from Delta because it has an extra mutation – K417N – found in the spike protein covering the surface of the virus that allows it to infect healthy cells.
Some experts say Delta Plus appears to be 10 to 15 percent more transmissible than the original Delta strain, which could be a factor in the UK’s rising case numbers.
In recent months, this new strain has caused both the World Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to class Delta and its AY lineages as a variant of concern.
And to those who think that vaccines are a waste of time in terms of halting the spread of the disease because they do not stop vaccinated people from spreading the virus Newshub has this advice:
… while Delta can still infect vaccinated people, their symptoms and their likelihood of spreading the virus are significantly reduced. They are also much less likely to die from the virus.”
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