China cares a lot about preventing Covid.
I haven’t written an additional China post because my sources have not turned up much additional information, and the situation does not seem to have dramatically changed, so I’m waiting until situation warrants an update. One development was mass testing going on in Beijing, raising worries about lockdown there which could be important politically, but so far the lockdowns haven’t happened.
America does not care much about preventing or treating Covid.
We don’t care about buying or distributing Paxlovid. We don’t care about updating our vaccines. We don’t care about much of anything else either. Nor does the public much care about any of this either. Given the physical situation and what state capacity allows us in terms of alternatives, I am not even sure I would prefer things be a different way. Yes, it means among other things that we literally have a cure for Covid and are barely using it, but it does mean we don’t suffer from lots of extra prevention costs.
The good news is that most of us can safely ignore the whole thing and get on with our lives. Given the alternatives, ‘government does literal nothing’ is not obviously bad news. If they’d done literal nothing from the start we could well be in a much better spot. Alas, this literal nothing does involve things like preventing children from being vaccinated.
The Current Thing not only is no longer Covid, it seems that the invasion of Ukraine has also been replaced due to the leaking of a Supreme Court draft opinion on abortion. Unlike Ukraine, that does not seem like a situation in which my analysis would be news you could use, and I hope to avoid writing much of anything about it.
Executive Summary
- New subvariants of Omicron that spread faster are taking over.
- They are not deadlier.
- Our government is acting as if it does not care about Covid at all.
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