The path of COVID-19 in China and the West, 2019 to 2021

The number of death from a pandemic is under Pareto distribution with its alpha being less than 1. (Notes for the nerds: such a distribution has an infinite mean and an infinite variance, a true realm of the unknowable.) That means we can’t know how many could die in a huge pandemic, from the past or using any statistical formulas.

Most people have never experienced such a pandemic, so the world’s reaction is fascinating and makes telling stories about how people think and behave. Indeed, since the year-end of 2019, we’ve observed a dramatic evolution in COVID-19 perception across different nations and cultures. This post is a recap of what has happened in the past two years.

2019 winter: the denounced Chinese government

Contrary to their later consensus, the public is overwhelmingly negative towards the government’s response in the winter of 2019 when COVID started. At that time, many Chinese are accustomed to the narrative of a corrupted Chinese government and terrible management systems. The blames are ubiquitous, some self-contradictory: Wuhan’s decision to lockdown is too strict or too late or meaningless; the slow response to constrain the virus; the vague communication, withholding information, and punishing whistleblowers.

Compared with other countries’ responses months later, with the information from China, the Chinese government in 2019 including Wuhan’s officials did a great job.

2020 Spring: the two strategies against COVID

WHO characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic on March 11th. Then the world came up with two strategies to combat the coronavirus. That dichotomy determined the two paths from corresponding countries and will possibly have a far-reaching impact on their economy and culture in years to come.

The West: Let it naturally run through, with some intervention

Knowing the contagious power of COVID, the culture and legal structure of the Western nations, the UK came up with the strategy of herd immunity with a flattened curve. From what I know, this is likely the best practical strategy for the West — could be optimal for the rest of the world too. It took great wisdom to figure it out and bigger courage to communicate it to the public at the very beginning of the pandemic.

The UK scientists concluded that the virus is too powerful to contain. However, mankind is also robust enough against such viruses. So the practical goal is to let the virus run through us naturally with the least damage. With herd immunity, the pandemic will be over. The steepness of the infection curve makes a huge difference. This is the focus of the government: to flatten the curve so that no public system like the hospital is squeezed.

This strategy is adopted by all western countries including the US. Eastern Asia, on the other hand, adopted a different approach.

East: Zero infection at all cost

China made the most extreme execution in this strategy: they aim to maintain a COVID-free island in the sea of coronavirus. They adopted expensive policies, most of which are not possible in democratic countries in the first place. For example, they quarantine the whole community by force when some infections are detected, sometimes moving everyone to a hotel — it’s like a concentration camp. Everyone arriving from abroad is forced to quarantine in a hotel for three weeks or longer.

The two strategies in 2020

The West scrambled to react

As the pandemic continues to evolve, western countries suffer from waves of case surges. Many less well-off people’s lives are made harder, although their lives would likely worsen regardless. Some components of the economy are squeezed due to COVID-19 including the lack of chips, supply chain disruption, and spiked oil price. But like the poor always get hurt, people have been messing the economy up without pandemics.

For the vast majority, life didn’t change much or get better because many get to work from home forever. Overall, the West caught up with the virus in 2020 and was adapting to live with it for the long term, as implied by the herd immunity strategy.

Covid became China’s political capital

China has a different perspective. Throughout 2020, their single-digit case number, compared to the tens of thousands in the US, made Chinese truly proud, much more proud than by their other accomplishments. With an abrupt turnaround, the public became overwhelmingly positive about their nation, the government, the CPP, and Xi the supreme leader — most Chinese don’t understand those four aren’t the same thing. The government wasted no time to capitalize it and became more autocratic politically.

China’s covid policies continued the zeroing-out strategy. They made sacrifices in various parts of the economy and people’s lives. For example, entering the Chinese border requires two to four weeks of forced quarantine at the travelers’ cost, even for Chinese citizens. China is willing to cut off from globalization in exchange for a covid-free land. Those policies showed signs of backfire in 2020.

2021: the year of vaccines

Vaccines were available at an unprecedented speed. The vaccines are proved to be highly effective against the then-dominant Beta variant. The U.S. even sees the new cases number approaching zero in the summer. Then Delta came and the world experienced another wave.

Against Delta and later variants, vaccines can prevent severe cases, but won’t do much towards the transmission. Vaccines saved billions’ lives but didn’t change the landscape of COVID in a larger sense: mankind still needs to find a way to normalize the COVID-ridden world.

The future

Omicron arrived at the end of 2021, as the strongest incarnation of the coronavirus. It is times more transmissible than the already highly infectious Delta. But as of January 2022, people believe that it tends to infect only the upper respiratory system, not the lung –– thus causing milder symptoms and less hospitalization or death. Some even believe Omicron is the vaccine from Mother Nature. The hope is that enough people will get their immunity from Omicron and COVID will die out afterward.

Looking back, herd immunity is clearly the only practical way. It’s natural, bottom-up, and thereby robust to human errors. The whole world can’t execute the strict lockdown like China. Even we have the administrative power, doing so will hurt the world even more than a deadly virus: the cure will be more harmful than the disease. Such large-scale intervention against Mother Nature or ourselves never worked, like Communism.

The price of zero COVID

At the same time, zeroing-out COVID cases became top political correctness in China. It smells like the cultural revolution 50 years ago. Top-down political systems like China always give birth to such drama.

To be fair, China’s severe lockdown could have ended the pandemic before April 2020 if the rest world followed suit without causing bigger troubles like dying from empty grocery stores. In today’s reality, the best-case scenario for China, if they continue to pursue this route, is capped. They can wait until the world gained sufficient herd immunity and COVID became endemic. Then they can gradually open up. Later disruption will be small due to the low occurrence of the infections. The worst case, however, is unbounded: Variants like Omicron continue to come up extending the pandemic for many years. Then the rest of the world will gradually build up immunity while China barely has any. Chinese effectively isolated themselves from the evolution — a massive human intervention –– and will face a grim future. The capped upside and unbounded downside is the hallmark of a fragile system — usually man-made –– facing uncertainty. I’m therefore pessimistic about China’s future.