The good folks at GPF put together a really interesting graphic on correlation of Chinese government's attempts to completely suppress any semblances of a COVID outbreak to the manufacturing output. It should not be a surprise to anyone that bipolar policy of locking down every time someone sneezes has a detrimental effect on all productive endeavors.

To be fair, there are some places where it makes no practical difference. For example, the great state of New Mexico where I live is so rabidly anti-business that nothing useful (from a business standpoint) was happening here before COVID and nothing useful is happening now. All the masking crap that is still an effect here at least until March is a pain in the neck for gyms and schools, but aside from that, short term difference is minimal.

Long term effects of masking 8 year olds are yet to be determined, but we do know that suicide attempts among teenage girls are up by 50% since masking and fear mongering started. I sorta have some faith in the resiliency of kids, but it has a huge asterisk to it. It is quite probable that in a year or two our esteemed educational "professionals" will decide that every child who had to wear a mask must go through mandatory counselling with local psychologists (read: mostly psychopaths with an occasional real professional quietly trying to be helpful). While I think kids are resilient enough to get beyond the masking crap, for a healthy child, coming out of a psychologist's office without permanent scars is virtually impossible.

That out of the way, in the linked article, there is a phrase that is so blindingly naive that I find it almost charming: "In the first year or so of these measures, they seemed to be a reasonable approach and helped Beijing successfully and rapidly contain the virus with fewer deaths than most Western countries."

This right there is one of the reasons so many analysts in the Western world fail so miserably when trying to make sense of what is happening in Russia, China, Iran and other totalitarian regimes. It is also one of the reasons why analytical endeavors where the analyst never leaves the comforts of the office should be taken with a grain of salt. No matter how good the analysis is, if the original data is bullcrap, so are the conclusions.

They think that the official statistics coming out of those countries are anything, but pure conjecture. The official World Health Organization on COVID deaths in China is less than 6,000 and a number of confirmed cases is around 140,000.

You have to be either a complete imbecil or a doctorate candidate in one of the many useless social sciences to believe those numbers are anything but pure and unadulterated lies.

At this stage we know quite a lot about the lethality and transmissibility of most COVID variants. It is perfectly reasonable to say that we do not know exactly how many people in China died from COVID, but given aging population living in very high density areas, it is definitely more than 6,000 and if I were to make a guess, I'd place it at three orders of magnitude more. We can have a nice argument of what it really is, but with 1.5billion people in China, a highly infectious virus and 0.5 to 1% lethality (much higher with older people whose lungs are already compromised by fifty years of smoking), a few million deaths is not an unreasonable guess. Hundreds of thousands is lowballing it, but that would be a lot more believable.

Here is the gyst for Americans who believe in sanctity of life: totalitarian thugs in the CCP do not share your sentiments. Chances are, they neither know nor care how many people got sick and how many people died. All they care about is that the official statistics make them look good.

When we were growing up in the Soviet Union, our basic foundational assumption on anything the government said was that they were lying. There was no need to put effort in figuring out where they were lying. The effort went into figuring what the truth was. Interestingly, that same principle can generally be applied to anything Jen Psaki says. If she ever tries to say something that is true, the effort of getting those words to come out of her mouth might choke her. If she were to tell me it is sunny outside, I'd probably grab an umbrella and peak out of the window to check how heavy the rain is.

When you see a statistic from China or Russia, assume they are lying. You'll be correct more often than not.

Going back to the Chinese manufacturing output, I wonder if this bipolar policy of shutting things down with every virus spike is going to finally push many Wester companies to set up their supply chain alternatives elsewhere.

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/zero-covid-and-manufacturing-in-china/