China’s Useful Covid Lesson – WSJ

This is a valuable lesson if the world ever faces an easily spreading virus whose death rate is an order of magnitude greater than we’ve been prepared to tolerate with the flu or, as events have shown, were prepared to tolerate with Covid-19.

Put this lesson in the bank. Also pretty clear, such steps are unsustainable in the case of a merely flu-like disease, and I doubt they will ever be tried again, even by the Chinese Communist Party.

Predictably, America’s graceless muddling also looks more defensible as China’s experiment ends in chaos. The sole intervention of any great precedential value still seems to be our speedy development of mRNA vaccines, which China, in an irony, rejected for its own people.

But the

Xi Jinping

regime has also proved rational after all. Political optimization was always the goal. It wasn’t trying to optimize for healthcare capacity prior to reopening. It wasn’t optimizing for peak immunity given an evolving virus and imperfect vaccines.

To keep itself in power, the regime will now shift from managing public discontent over lockdowns to managing public anger over rampant death and failing healthcare.

Underlying the switch,

Mike Ryan

of the World Health Organization explained last week that the surge filling Beijing’s hospitals is the cause, not the consequence, of the country’s big policy switch. China had already lost control of the virus.

The circle is complete. It was the same Dr. Ryan who offered a surprised endorsement of China’s Covid strategy in March 2020, suggesting against all expectations that a flu-like virus was being corralled and eliminated. The respected medical site StatNews declared that a “dogma” was overturned, namely that flu-like diseases must be endured.

Oh those happy days, they weren’t built to last. Just weeks later Dr. Ryan would be touting Sweden as a more realistic model for a world that would live with the coronavirus rather than defeat it.

In a moment symbolic of an instinct among…