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t has been just over a month since China dropped its zero COVID approach to the pandemic. Since then the disease has spread rapidly in China’s cities and there is lots of evidence that many people have died (hospitals, funeral parlors and crematoriums in Beijing have been overwhelmed) but very few of those deaths get reported in the official COVID death toll. Today the NY Times reports there’s reason to think the situation is going to get worse as the disease is now moving into rural areas where there are no real hospitals or treatment available for anyone who gets...

BEIJING, Nov 24 (Reuters) - China reported record high COVID-19 infections on Thursday, with cities nationwide imposing localised lockdowns, mass testing and other curbs that are fuelling frustration and darkening the outlook for the world's second largest economy. The resurgence of infections, nearly three years after the pandemic emerged in the central city of Wuhan, casts doubt on investor hopes for China to ease its rigid zero-COVID policy soon, despite recent more targeted measures.

How Xi Jinping's dogmatic pursuit of zero Covid policy in China risks sparking ANOTHER global supply chain crisis by shutting down major manufacturing hubs causing shortages of iPhones, cars and other gadgets Authorities across China are trying to stem the spread of the country's worst Covid outbreak in two years Some of the toughest measures seen in key manufacturing hubs of Shenzhen, Dongguan and Changchun Regions' factories supply everything from electric scooters and toys to air conditioning units and USB sticks New Chinese lockdowns prompted by President Xi's zero Covid policy risk sparking another global supply chain crisis and causing...

Chinese officials reported 1,807 new symptomatic COVID cases on Sunday — more than triple the number reported the previous day and the country’s highest figure in two years. The northeastern province of Jilin accounted for 78 percent of the national total, China’s National Health Commission said. The nationwide total easily topped Saturday’s count, which was already a record for cases since the country’s first outbreak in early 2020 — sparking a fresh round of lockdowns.

Despite rumblings about Beijing potentially dropping its controversial zero-COVID policy, authorities in Shanghai, China’s financial capital and a city home to nearly 25 million, have decided to shutter schools and rapidly construct hospitals as the omicron variant appears to be spreading rapidly within the country’s financial capital, according to Bloomberg. The latest outbreak has been labeled “the most significant” since Wuhan, with some 1,000 domestic cases having been confirmed as of Friday, up from just 300 a week ago. That’s the highest number of new cases recorded in 2 years, since the days of the original Wuhan outbreak. But in...

On January 12, Professor Kwok Yung Yuen diagnosed a family with the coronavirus in Shenzhen, 700 miles from Wuhan. Only some of the family members had been to the city where the COVID-19 outbreak originated, so Yuen knew immediately that he was seeing evidence of human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus. He immediately alerted the authorities in Beijing. But it took eight days for Beijing to warn the world that the coronavirus, which has now killed almost 650,000 people and infected over 16 million, could be spread through human-to-human transmission. Yuen, who spoke to the BBC show Panorama for an...

Today the Washington Free Beacon points out that the World Health Organization has updated its official timeline of the coronavirus outbreak to make clear that China did not self-report the existence of the virus to WHO in December. Here’s what the old timeline claimed: 31 Dec 2019Wuhan Municipal Health Commission, China, reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, Hubei Province. A novel coronavirus was eventually identified. The revised version of the timeline makes clear that WHO wasn’t informed by China directly. Instead, the virus first came to the attention of WHO when officials noticed Chinese media reports...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY During the 2003 SARS pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used its stranglehold on journalists and dissidents in China to hide information and obfuscate the source of the outbreak. CCP leaders failed to inform the World Health Organization (WHO) about the virus for four months. In the wake of this malfeasance, the world demanded reforms to the International Health Regulations that govern how countries are required to handle public health emergencies. Today, it has become clear that the CCP failed to heed these lessons. The ongoing pandemic is a tragic second chapter to their mishandling of the 2003...

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has found the trading sections for meat and seafood in Beijing’s wholesale food market to be severely contaminated with the new coronavirus and suspects the area’s low temperature and high humidity may have been contributing factors, officials said on Thursday. Their preliminary report comes as the country’s capital tackles a resurgence of COVID-19 cases over the past week linked to the massive Xinfadi food center, which houses warehouses and trading halls in an area the size of nearly 160 soccer pitches. The latest outbreak infected more than 100 people and raised fears of wider contagion in...

New coronavirus reports from Beijing are very sketchy. According to Chinese authorities they have identified a new strain of coronavirus at a massive wholesale food market in Beijing called the Xinfadi Market. They are blaming “European Salmon”… Beijing officials have reported 79 cases over the past four days, the biggest concentration of infections since February. The spate of new cases prompted officials in many parts of the city to swiftly bring back tough counter-epidemic measures, with at least three districts entering “war-time mode.” Measures imposed included erecting round-the-clock security checkpoints, closing schools and sports venues, and reinstating temperature checks at...

Fresh evidence of China’s shocking cover-up of the pandemic outbreak has been found in censored media reports from Wuhan. Samples taken from sick patients and analysed by at least five laboratories had confirmed the existence of a lethal new coronavirus before China told global health authorities about an infectious disease that it claimed was unidentified. The reports obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that one team even found the virus was ‘clearly contagious’ while others had unravelled its genetic composition – vital for developing diagnostic tests and vaccines.

The World Health Organization struggled to get needed information from China during critical early days of the coronavirus pandemic, according to recordings of internal meetings that contradict the organisation’s public praise of Beijing’s response to the outbreak. The recordings, obtained by the Associated Press (AP), show officials complaining in meetings during the week of 6 January that Beijing was not sharing data needed to evaluate the risk of the virus to the rest of the world. It was not until 20 January that China confirmed coronavirus was contagious and 30 January that the WHO declared a global emergency. “We’re going...

Coronavirus patients in northeastern China are reportedly taking longer to recover from the virus and to exhibit symptoms than patients from the original outbreak in Wuhan, one of China’s top doctors told state TV Tuesday. Dr. Qiu Haibo, who is taking care of patients in the northeast, said the more than two-week incubation period is making it hard to keep the virus from spreading and could show the virus is changing, Bloomberg reported. Patients in the northeast also mostly have lung damage rather than in their heart, kidney and stomach as in Wuhan. At least 46 cases have popped up...

Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, said in an interview Sunday suggested that China “sent hundreds of thousands” on aircraft throughout the world to “seed” the spread of the virus. Navarro told ABC News’ “This Week” that the “Chinese—behind the shield of the World Health Organization—for two months hid the virus from the world and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed that. They could have kept it in Wuhan, but instead, it became a pandemic.”

German intelligence says China asked the WHO to help it cover up COVID-19 May 9, 2020German intelligence officials say they have obtained evidence that the Chinese government asked the World Health Organization to help it cover up the coronavirus outbreak in a finding that is sure to place no small amount of renewed pressure on Beijing. In fact, Chinese President Xi Jinping personally asked the World Health Organization to delay the release of critical information early in the outbreak, German intelligence officials conclude.Xi met with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on January 21 to request that he withhold information about...

The liberal media have gone to bat for fellow liberal and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates against “conspiracy” theories regarding the coronavirus that started in Wuhan, China. But recent comments from Gates on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS shilling for the Chinese government may have just made that mission to insulate the billionaire a bit harder. In his questioning of Gates, Zakaria said: “You've been making this case for international cooperation very powerfully and in my mind persuasively. There is right now in Washington a very different mood, which is to say far from cooperating with the second largest economy in the...

In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease hosted a mass banquet for tens of thousands of people; millions began traveling through for Lunar New Year celebrations. President Xi Jinping warned the public on the seventh day, Jan. 20. But by that time, more than 3,000 people had been infected during almost a week of public silence, according to internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and expert estimates based on retrospective infection data. Six days. That delay...

China lied and people died. In December, China ordered its scientists to destroy samples that showed they had a pneumonia-like virus on their hands. They strong-armed doctors from trying to spread the word, kept medical staff in the dark, and prevented new cases of what we know was the Wuhan Coronavirus, or COVID-19, from being reported. And now doctors who tried to raise awareness have vanished. Vloggers documenting the situation on the ground have also disappeared. China allowed Chinese New Year to be celebrated which led to scores of people being exposed. In all, some 5 million people had left...

When everything from professional sports to entertainment award shows have become political forums, it’s no surprise that an infectious disease outbreak moved from the realm of science to politics. In politics there are few coincidences, defined as “Remarkable concurrences of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” What to the casual observer appears random are events actually created or steered in a certain direction for political objectives. The Trump presidency provides a timeline of such examples, including the current viral pandemic, suggesting that these are not simply serendipitous events. Seeing the forest and the trees, finding the larger pattern among...

A Chinese government-backed property giant has secretly raided in bulk Australia’s supplies of masks, hand sanitiser, antibacterial wipes and essential medical supplies and shipped them back to China. The Greenland Group, which manages high-end real estate projects in Sydney and Melbourne, proactively drained Australian supplies of anti-coronavirus equipment, The Sydney Morning Herald reported. Three million surgical masks, 500,000 pairs of gloves and bulk supplies of sanitiser and wipes were bought up in Australia and other countries where Greenland operates. While the bulk purchases and shipping were perfectly legitimate, the goods shipped in bulk to China include the very items that...