![]() To put that in perspective, there were 16 deaths from Covid yesterday just in New Hampshire, the US’s 10th smallest state. These exposés of China’s “missteps” generally boil down to Beijing not taking the virus seriously enough before January 23, 2020, when it put the entire city of Wuhan in quarantine-at which point the virus had been implicated in 17 deaths. The genuinely remarkable thing is that the New York Times, the US’s most prestigious newspaper, has devoted considerable resources to investigating why China didn’t address the pandemic even more quickly and effectively than it did (, 10/14/20, 1/20/21). Given these realities, it’s no wonder China thinks it has responded to the coronavirus far better than the US has-because, objectively, it has. China’s GDP grew by 2.3% in 2020, while the US’s shrank by 2.5%.The United States’ current one-week average is 3,258 per day. China is now averaging between one and two deaths from Covid per day.In the US, it’s 433,000, more than 1 out of every thousand people. In China, less than 5,000 people have died from Covid, a little more than 3 out of every million people.The US, with a population of 330 million, has so far had more than 25 million cases. China, a country of 1.4 billion people, has had just under 90,000 confirmed cases of Covid.It’s a puzzling passage, suggesting as it does that it’s “spin” to portray China’s Covid response as an “undisputed victory…compared to that of the United States.” Let’s do that comparison: The state-run news media has largely ignored the government’s missteps and portrayed China’s response as proof of the superiority of its authoritarian system, especially compared to that of the United States and other democracies, which are still struggling to contain raging outbreaks. Hernández, went on to say:Ĭhina has spent much of the past year trying to spin the narrative of the pandemic as an undisputed victory led by the ruling Communist Party. Well, that’s how you should feel about our own world’s New York Times, which ran an article ( 1/10/21) with the subhead, “The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to hide its missteps have taken on new urgency as the anniversary of the world’s first Covid-19 lockdown nears.” The article, by Amy Qin and Javier C. “China’s leaders have little interest in dwelling on the past or revisiting their mistakes,” say journalists from a much smaller country where 87 times as many people have now died from Covid ( New York Times, 1/10/21).
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