La guerra delle narrazioni sulla pandemia di COVID-19 si sta trasformando in una battaglia giudiziaria a pieno titolo, con implicazioni che vanno ben oltre i confini degli Stati Uniti. In una mossa definita ritorsiva da diversi osservatori, la Cina ha avviato un’azione legale contro lo Stato americano del Missouri e alcuni suoi funzionari, chiedendo 50,5 miliardi di dollari e una pubblica rettifica. La causa sarebbe stata presentata presso un tribunale intermedio di Wuhan e arriva dopo che il Missouri ha tentato di passare dalla sentenza ai fatti, sollecitando l’intervento di autorità federali per riscuotere un maxi-risarcimento ottenuto negli Stati Uniti contro Pechino e una serie di entità collegate.

Dalla causa del 2020 alla sentenza record del 2025

Il contenzioso nasce nel pieno della prima ondata pandemica. Nel 2020 il Missouri aveva intentato una causa contro la Repubblica Popolare Cinese, il Partito Comunista Cinese e varie istituzioni ed entità cinesi, sostenendo che alcune condotte, tra cui l’accaparramento di dispositivi di protezione individuale, avrebbero aggravato l’impatto della pandemia sullo Stato. Dopo una fase iniziale complessa, durante la quale parti dell’impianto accusatorio erano state giudicate infondate, un passaggio chiave è arrivato quando la giustizia federale d’appello ha consentito di proseguire almeno su un segmento della controversia: quello legato al presunto accaparramento di dispositivi di protezione.

Il punto di svolta è datato 7 marzo 2025, quando un giudice federale del Missouri ha emesso una sentenza in contumacia, poiché la parte cinese non avrebbe partecipato al procedimento. Il Missouri, attraverso l’ufficio del Procuratore Generale, ha presentato la decisione come “storica”, quantificando il risarcimento in 24 miliardi di dollari.

Nella narrazione dello Stato americano, quel verdetto costituirebbe la base per un recupero danni senza precedenti. In una successiva comunicazione ufficiale, l’ufficio del Procuratore Generale del Missouri ha affermato che, esaurito un periodo d’attesa richiesto dalla normativa federale prima di procedere all’esecuzione verso uno Stato estero, il Missouri sarebbe ora nelle condizioni di avviare il “prossimo passo” per la riscossione.

Dal verdetto alla riscossione alla contro-causa

Il nodo, però, è sempre stato lo stesso: come incassare. Ed è proprio quando il Missouri prova a trasformare la sentenza in denaro che la crisi sale di livello. La Cina ha reagito depositando la propria causa dopo che il Missouri ha chiesto supporto a funzionari federali statunitensi per la raccolta dell’importo, stimato in circa 25 miliardi di dollari includendo componenti come interessi e penalità.

Da parte sua, l’ufficio del Procuratore Generale del Missouri ha liquidato l’azione cinese come una manovra di pressione e dilazione, sostenendo che lo Stato proseguirà con iniziative mirate a colpire beni riconducibili alla Cina.

Per capire perché questo caso è così spinoso bisogna entrare nel terreno dell’immunità sovrana, cioè il principio secondo cui uno Stato non può essere facilmente trascinato davanti ai tribunali di un altro Stato. Negli Stati Uniti la cornice normativa è rappresentata dal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. In estrema sintesi, i governi stranieri sono in genere immuni, ma esistono eccezioni, tra cui quella per le attività commerciali con effetti diretti negli Stati Uniti.

La sentenza da oltre 24 miliardi di dollari si fonda sull’idea che il presunto accaparramento di dispositivi di protezione individuale, nella prima fase della pandemia, possa essere qualificato come condotta commerciale con effetti sul mercato statunitense. Qui sta anche uno dei punti più controversi: anche quando un tribunale ammette una causa superando l’immunità dalla giurisdizione, l’immunità dall’esecuzione può essere ancora più ampia. In altre parole, anche con una sentenza in mano, sequestrare beni statali esteri è tutt’altra partita.

Quali beni? Tra asset reali e limiti pratici

Sul piano politico interno, il Missouri ha evocato più volte la possibilità di agire su asset cinesi presenti negli Stati Uniti. In alcuni approfondimenti è stata citata l’ipotesi di proprietà e investimenti: in Missouri, infatti, interessi cinesi risultano collegati a circa 44.000 acri di terreni agricoli. Resta tuttavia centrale la domanda se tali beni siano effettivamente riconducibili al governo cinese o piuttosto a soggetti privati o aziende non direttamente aggredibili sulla base della sentenza.

È proprio questa ambiguità, tra ciò che è “cinese” in senso politico e ciò che è “cinese” in senso commerciale, a rendere l’operazione ad alto rischio. Un conto è annunciare una riscossione, un altro è superare l’intreccio di proprietà, controlli societari, immunità e autorizzazioni federali.

Per Pechino, la questione non è solo economica ma di principio. Riconoscere la competenza di un tribunale statunitense su scelte compiute in Cina durante una crisi sanitaria globale significherebbe aprire un varco enorme. La Cina definisce l’impianto accusatorio assurdo e sostiene che si tratti di un’operazione politicamente motivata, ribadendo la propria sovranità e inserendo la vicenda in un quadro più ampio di presunta diffamazione internazionale.

Per gli Stati Uniti, e soprattutto per la politica locale, la causa ha un altro valore. Intercetta il malcontento di una parte dell’opinione pubblica che chiede responsabilità e risarcimenti per gli effetti sociali ed economici della pandemia. In questo senso, anche un contenzioso dall’esito incerto può diventare uno strumento di posizionamento politico.

Cosa può succedere adesso

Nel breve periodo, i punti chiave saranno tre. Primo, il tentativo del Missouri di eseguire la sentenza e individuare beni effettivamente aggredibili, un’operazione che resta tecnicamente complessa e dall’esito tutt’altro che scontato. Secondo, l’evoluzione della causa intentata dalla Cina, che potrebbe avere un valore più simbolico e politico che strettamente giuridico. Terzo, il possibile effetto domino: se altri Stati o attori istituzionali dovessero imitare il Missouri, il rischio sarebbe una frammentazione giudiziaria della geopolitica pandemica, con ritorsioni incrociate e un ulteriore irrigidimento dei rapporti tra Washington e Pechino.

La pandemia, a distanza di anni, continua così a produrre conseguenze non solo sanitarie, ma giuridiche e diplomatiche. E questa volta il campo di battaglia non è un laboratorio o un’organizzazione internazionale, bensì un intricato sistema di tribunali, immunità sovrane e beni sequestrabili, dove ogni mossa rischia di trasformarsi in un precedente globale.

L'articolo La Cina fa una causa da 50 miliardi al Missouri e rischia di aggravare la guerra tra Pechino e Washington proviene da InsideOver.

The news from China is bad. The lifting of strict COVID-19 regulations in early December -regulations that had been sternly enforced for almost three years, under the country’s so-called “Zero-COVID” policy- has been followed by a great surge of infections. The existence of such a surge was suspected for weeks but denied by Chinese officialdom, who withheld data. Then, on January 14, a spokeswoman from the National Health Commission admitted that the country had suffered almost 60,000 Covid-related deaths since December 8. The virus is belatedly tormenting China the way it tormented northern Italy, New York City, and parts of Brazil back in spring of 2020.

The China surge hit first in urban areas, including Beijing and Shanghai, but also far-flung cities such as Dongguan in the South and Yulin in the North. Hospitals were overwhelmed, medicines (including simple fever reducers such as ibuprofen) became scarce, and many healthcare professionals continued to work despite being infected themselves. Since early January, the disease has begun piling up victims in rural areas well. Small clinics and community health centers are filling with patients to whom they can offer only basic care. The Chinese population remains especially vulnerable because immunity from past infections is very low and full vaccination of elderly people is low also. The three years of “Zero-COVID” were evidently wasted by Chinese authorities, who might have used that delay period to prepare better for the inevitable. But they did not.

So the pandemic is not over. The Covid coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2, is not gone. It’s as busy as ever, replicating, mutating, evolving. It will almost certainly remain in the human population forever. And there is no guarantee (despite what some people believe they have heard) that it will evolve into a less harmless form, such as the viruses that cause common colds. That misunderstanding is sometimes supported by an ill-informed adage that passes for wisdom: “A successful parasite does not kill its host.” Wrong. The correct statement would be: “A successful parasite does not kill its host until it has had time to infect another host.” If the coronavirus infects person A, transmits to person B and person C, and from person C onward to others, then it has achieved evolutionary success, whether or not person A dies. Darwinian natural selection, the main mechanism of evolution, does not “see” and does not “care” what happens to infected individuals after they have transmitted a virus.

Amid the continuing turmoil, we need to appreciate that SARS-CoV-2 may remain not just present but deadly, and that we may need to continue vaccinating against it, and fighting it in other ways, for decades.

Where did this virus come from? How did it get into humans? Those questions are also important, because the answers will help guide our efforts to prevent similar viral pandemics in the future. The mystery of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 has been hotly discussed, with mostly scientific experts on one side of the matter and mostly amateur sleuths plus a few journalists on the other. That discussion has been muddled by misinformation, speculation, and accusation, all offered to suggest that the virus somehow leaked from a laboratory. A lab leak is theoretically possible, but there is no positive evidence that it happened. There is much empirical evidence and expert analysis by molecular evolutionary virologists and epidemiologists, on the other hand, suggesting that the virus probably reached humans by natural spillover from a wild animal. That seems to have occurred in or around a certain “wet market” in the city of Wuhan. The animal carrying the virus may have been a raccoon dog or a palm civet or a bamboo rat or one of the other wild creatures, captured live and transported to Wuhan, that were on sale for food in the market. Some evidence even suggests that two distinct chains of human infection began in the market, which might reflect viral transmission from two different animals. The carrier animal (or animals) likely acquired the virus, either in the wild or during transport, from a horseshoe bat. Viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2 have been detected in horseshoe bats in southern China, and also in Thailand and Laos, just across the southern Chinese border.

More evidence is needed, but the process of gathering such evidence and sharing it among scientists has been severely constrained by two factors: the pandemic itself and mutual distrust between the Chinese government and its critics in the West, much exacerbated by this origins controversy.

One more thing is important for everyone to remember: that the trafficking of wild animals for food-bats or raccoon dogs in China, bats or pangolins in Africa, other creatures elsewhere- is not the only disruptive activity that exposes humans to wildlife viruses. The extraction of timber and fossil fuels from richly diverse tropical ecosystems is another. The mining of strategic minerals such as coltan—a material essential for the manufacture of high-tech electronic devices—is still another. Therefore, anyone who owns a smart phone or a laptop computer or a fancy camera, or even a new car, also owns a share of responsibility for the continuing threat of viral spillover.

Eight billion humans presently inhabit this planet, all of us hungry, all of us thirsty, all of us consuming energy and wood and other material resources, in various quantities, as our appetites dictate and our levels of affluence allow. At the other end of the spectrum of sentience lie viruses, these relatively simple creatures, of which Earth harbors many millions of different forms. Among the millions, maybe one or two million kinds of virus reside in nonhuman mammals and birds. I highlight mammals and birds because they are generally the sources of the new viruses that infect people—not just SARS-CoV-2 and the original SARS virus of 2003, but also Ebola virus and Marburg and Lassa and Hendra and Nipah and HIV and many others.

With our voracious consumption, our disruption of diverse ecosystems, our devastation of natural landscapes all over the globe, we humans continue driving the most vulnerable of our fellow creatures toward extinction: the western chimpanzee, the eastern lowland gorilla, the tiger, the slender-billed curlew, the sociable lapwing, Hill’s horseshoe bat, and too many others to name, each serving as host to its own viruses. Many of those viruses are malleable opportunists. Evolution allows them to change, rather quickly, and compels them to survive. As the planet gets smaller and emptier, their best remaining opportunity will be to infect us.

That’s a grim and ironic sort of justice, and we should do all possible not to earn it.

L'articolo Ecological disruption and pandemic threats proviene da InsideOver.

The health system of the much vaunted second most powerful economy of the world has all but collapsed in the face of a Covid-19 outbreak. According to a New York Times report on December 26, 2022, “the government has now simply disappeared, just as many Chinese are getting very ill with the virus or dying from it.”

The irony of the situation is quite telling. The faulty Covid management policy of the Communist Party of China caused some problems. Experts have pointed out that the root cause behind the explosive Covid outbreak in China is the policy of President Xi Jinping of self-reliance in fighting Covid. Xi has refused to use foreign-made mRNA vaccines that are a product of cutting edge technology; instead promoting domestic vaccines based on inactivated versions of the virus and barring all foreign ones from the market.

Unfortunately, however, Chinese vaccines have been marked for lack of efficacy and waning durability. According to reports adverse reactions to Chinese vaccines have led to death and severe disabilities. Parents are refusing to give permission to administer the shots to their children. According to an AP report from Beijing on December 27, 2022, with the massive outbreak in Covid-19 cases, as the authorities in China were going door to door and even paying people older than 60 years of age to get vaccinated, many people were refusing to get vaccinated; alarmed over reports of fever, blood clot and other side effects of Chinese vaccines. “When people hear about such incidents, they may not be willing to take the vaccine,” the report quoted 64-year-old resident of Beijing Li Liansheng.

Instead of importing effective vaccines and other medicines, President of China Xi Jinping had been trying to keep the impending Covid outbreak under control through a draconian zero-Covid policy which did incalculable harm to the Chinese economy but failed to control the virus.

That the zero-Covid policy did not have the desired result is evident from a report of the National Health Commission of China that over 40,000 new cases were recorded even in the midst of harsh lockdowns and repeated mass testing which have marked the zero-Covid policy. Rather, the policy was counterproductive, as the subsequent developments have established. The emphasis on lockdown and mass testing had led to a low rate of administration of vaccines and boosters, leaving the elderly particularly vulnerable to infection. About 65 percent of the people above the age of 60 years have been vaccinated in China and only about 45 percent have received the booster shots. Hitherto, the Chinese policy has been to limit the administration of vaccines to people between 19 and 60 years of age.

Faced with a mutinous situation the Chinese government did a U-turn and withdrew all restrictions in a hurry, causing a massive outbreak of the disease. Swiftly and haphazardly, Beijing reversed course by abandoning altogether the strict zero-Covid policy two weeks ago.

The NYT report has summarized the situation succinctly. “In its single-minded pursuit of the zero-Covid strategy, the Chinese government was omnipresent and omnipotent, using its unlimited resources and unchecked power to control the nation. After having nearly exhausted its resources and the goodwill of the public, the government has now simply disappeared, just as many Chinese are getting very ill with the virus or dying from it.”

As people are dying in thousands and doctors are collapsing under pressure at overcrowded hospitals, there is not even a mask mandate in the country now. Medicines are in short supply. Schools are still open though no one is attending them as children are either ill or are worried about getting sick. “No one is in charge now,” the NYT report has quoted Shenzhen engineer Yang who did not want his full name to be quoted in the report for fear of persecution. For about the last one year, Yang had to undertake Covid tests almost every day; and used to get a reminder from the bosses in the district if he missed one. 

Things have come to such a pass that in the absence of directions at the moment of crisis, the people are questioning the legitimacy and the credibility of the rule of the CPC. Videos have gone viral of hundreds of Chinese citizens in queues outside fever clinics and hospitals. Understaffed hospitals and the shortage of ventilators and medicines have led to chaos and panic in several cities in China. A video shared by a U.K.-based media outlet shows a doctor collapsing on the floor while attending patients.

It does not need an expert to analyze why the Covid situation in China has come to such a sorry pass. The authorities in China had known for a long time that the vaccines developed domestically were ineffective. The need to establish the superiority of the Chinese system was, however, stronger than the need to save lives of the common Chinese people; so the import of vaccines from the USA or the U.K. was ruled out.

To delay the inevitable outbreak, a draconian lockdown was imposed; harming the economy and ruining the daily life of the ordinary citizens; leaving people without jobs and a fall in income. At the end of 2022, sentiments among the manufacturing and service business in China were said to be the lowest since 2020. Almost 80 percent of European business in China has cut revenue projections, according to the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. The unemployment rate among the youth is estimated to be 20 percent.

When people rebelled, the restrictions were completely withdrawn; leading to a massive outbreak. The government conveniently passed the blame on “foreign agents” for engineering the rebellion and withdrew from the scene.

“Government disappears”

As the situation continues to worsen, the Chinese government has panicked and stopped giving out the death figures. Reports say this decision of the National Health Commission of China came into effect on December 25, 2022. The drastic decision has baffled experts as the NHC has released Covid data for the last three years.

A World Health Organization report on the Covid situation in China says between January 3, 2020 and December 23, 2022, there have been more than 10 million confirmed Covid cases in China and 31,585 deaths. Experts have warned of between one million and two million deaths in China in 2023.

The WHO has warned that Beijing’s way of counting the deaths would underestimate the total death toll. The Chinese government has narrowed the criterion for Covid deaths, inviting widespread criticisms from across the world. Beijing has announced that only those who had died directly of respiratory failure caused by the virus would be included in the Covid death figures. This does not correspond to WHO guidelines and results in a figure way below the death figures in other countries.

Figures do not reveal the gravity of the whole situation. According to reports emanating from behind the bamboo curtain, emergency wards in hospitals, especially in small cities and towns, are overwhelmed. Intensive care units are turning away ambulances, relatives of sick people are searching for open beds and patients are slumped on benches in hospital corridors and lying on floors in want of beds.

“After the Chinese government ordered sudden lifting of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing, hospitals have been struggling, crematoriums are overwhelmed and pharmacies are running out of medicines,” says one report on the situation in China. Most Chinese hospitals are grappling with the problem of few doctors and a large number of patients. The rate of infection in hospitals is developing faster than that in society. The infected staff is unable to report for duty, leading to the staff shortage.

Because of mismanagement of the situation by the government, insufficient medical resources have emerged as one of the biggest problems facing the people of China. Reports in the Chinese media highlight that hospitals in the country are faced with an acute shortage of ICU beds, ventilators as well as medical professionals while medicines have vanished from the market.

As the zero-Covid policy was abandoned in a hurry and the number of Covid cases rose significantly in the past few weeks, panic-stricken people started hoarding critical medicines. Infected families are unable to find even common antipyretic medicines that are used to reduce fever. Despite the efforts by the CPC to control the epidemic with home-made medicines, more and more people are opting for generic versions of anti-Covid oral drugs from India,  like Pfizer’s anti-Covid oral drug Paxlovid. Within a week of the surge in Covid-19 cases at the end of December 2022, these drugs were sold out in various e-commerce websites and advance pre-booking became necessary. According to reports, these drugs were also selling widely in the Chinese black market.

The rapid Covid outbreak has exposed one weakness of the available medical facilities in China, the disparity in critical care capabilities between urban and rural areas. Despite claims of China now competing with developed countries, the rural areas in China have much weaker medical resources compared to big cities, particularly intensive care facilities for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the infants. Local governments which are responsible for providing these health services are starved of funds. Doctors in China are reported to be a worried lot if the medical and healthcare system in the Chinese countryside is at all prepared to cope with the impending onslaught of Covid-19. 

L'articolo Health infrastructure in China collapses under Covid-19 outbreak proviene da InsideOver.

China is facing a double whammy of Covid infections and economic crises, which are interlinked, and one gets worse if another is tried to be addressed. The number of new Covid cases is rising rapidly while businesses and industries are facing losses and shutdowns. There are predictions that China is expected to see more than one million Covid-related death in the coming days. At the same time, the Chinese government is struggling to impose curbs thanks to a negative impact on the country’s economy. Analysts have forecasted China’s economic growth to slump to 2.8-3.2 per cent this year, which would be the lowest in five decades.

China has for the first time officially acknowledged Covid deaths in recent weeks. This has given credibility to the reports of a heavy death toll in the country due to Covid infections. Crematoriums are busy and dead bodies covered in yellow bags can be seen lying on the floor. Even health workers are getting infected with coronavirus, leading to disruption of emergency and crematorium services. Bodies had to be kept waiting for three days before they are cremated. This gives a glimpse into the deteriorating situation in China. Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) has projected over a million deaths in the next year while a third of China’s population is expected to be Covid positive by April 1.

Beijing government has sounded an alarm over new three waves of Covid infections in the coming months. Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said there are likely to be three successive waves until March 2023. The rush at hospitals, crematoriums, and social media posts are revealing that China is facing a huge health crisis that is likely to be bigger than the previous waves of Covid. “We cremated 150 bodies [in a day], many times more than a typical day last winter,” said an employee at Beijing Dongjiao Funeral Home. Another employee at Tongzhou Funeral Home said the demand was largely due to Covid deaths. “We’re burning from morning until 10pm. The furnaces can’t take it,” he said.

A few weeks ago, different cities in China had seen unprecedented protests from people over the failure of the Zero Covid policy. Protestors raised concerns over inhuman conditions during quarantines and over the loss of livelihoods.It also saw calls being made to overthrow Xi and the communist regime. While the Zero Covid policy appears to have failed in containing Covid infections, it dealt a severe blow to China’s economy. The retail sale has fallen by 5.9 per cent in November year-on-year while the slump for property investment is a whopping 19 per cent. Industrial output and fixed asset investment have slowed down to 2.2 per cent and 5.3 per cent respectively.

The abrupt shutdown of factories and even small businesses including restaurants led to huge livelihood losses. Major international companies including US-based Apple and Japan’s Renesas Electronics were forced to suspend their operations. The unemployment rate has reached 5.7 per cent while it jumped to 17.1 per cent for young people ages 16 to 24. Yet, the Beijing government continued with strict restrictions under the Zero Covid policy. Following the public protest, it has relaxed some restrictions. However, the warnings of new and dreadful covid waves have created a catch-22 situation.

Earlier, analysts had warned Beijing that its Zero Covid policy was hurting its economy and jobs in China as the restrictions reduced the demand. “Some companies, affected by the drop in orders, laid off workers to lower costs,” said Wang Zhe, senior economist for Caixin Insight Group. Now, Beijing has finally abandoned the Zero Covid policy, experts do not expect economy recovery anytime soon. Rather it continues to deteriorate. “I am expecting a big collapse in industrial production in December,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist of Asia-Pacific at Natixis.

Highlighting the slowdown in the Chinese economy, a report by the World Economics Sales Managers Survey has expressed the possibility of a recession in 2023. “(Chinese economy) may be heading for a recession in 2023.The lights may not have gone out, but prospects for economic growth in 2023 have certainly dimmed,” the report reads. If China reimposes the Zero Covid policy to contain damages by upcoming Covid waves, there will be a huge impact on its economy. If not, people’s lives will be in danger. It is a double whammy for China.

L'articolo Beijing struggles to choose between economy recovery and Covid-control proviene da InsideOver.

The “Blank Paper Revolution” rocked mainland China less than 100 days after the re-election of Xi Jinping during the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in October. The uprising has focused in a way not seen since the Communists took control of the mainland in 1949, and Xi is facing an unprecedented crisis. The world is keenly watching the “Unthinkable” collapse of Communist China as analysts believe that if Xi Jinping does not give up the “Zero-COVID Clearing” policy, it may lead to major changes, and China is in the midst of a major turning point.

Blank sheets of paper have become a symbol of a mass uprising which China is witnessing against the Communist-ruled strict Zero-COVID policy. These blank sheets of paper have become iconic during the protests, which many now refer to as the “Blank White Paper Revolution”. Over the weekend, thousands of demonstrators in Shanghai, Beijing, Urumqi, Wuhan, Chengdu, and other major cities protested against the CCP’s enforced lockdown, mandatory nucleic acid testing, mask orders, and other regulations, chanting political demands such as “Communist Party step down”. Protesters hold up blank A4 papers to show how freedom of speech is lacking in China.

As of 28 November, protests have spread to Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, Chongqing, Nanjing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Hefei, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xi’an, Urumqi, Zhejiang, Dali, Xiamen, Zhuzhou At least 18 provinces and cities, including Beijing, Xuzhou, and more than 79 institutions of higher learning, including Beijing Tsinghua University, Nanjing Institute of Communication, Shanghai Fudan University School of Journalism, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Science and Technology Universities and others responded together.

AFP reported that Chinese protesters devised countless creative ways to express their dissatisfaction with the government and the anti-epidemic zero policy, including holding up blank paper, using complex word games, and other innovative ways to evade censorship, express anger and support protest activity. The protests in mainland China were sparked by a deadly fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang, that killed several people in apartments, a disaster partly caused by lockdowns imposed by authorities. Regarding the death toll, the official report stated that there were ten people, but local people reported at least 40 people. The fire in Urumqi shocked many people. Especially the residents of big cities faced the same situation. The fire exits and the entire road were blocked.

The current situation has prompted many young people to think independently, especially regarding their interests. The anti-zero-COVID campaign coalesced with the rising sense that Communist China had become responsible for a loss of hope, freedom, and wealth.

“Nikkei” published an article that: Xi Jinping’s biggest crisis in the past ten years is facing a humiliating retreat. The report pointed out that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems to have made another mistake, trusting the repression machine too much to implement the blockade. Unlike the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, we are now encountering an entirely different kind of mass protest, this anti-blockade protest that is nationwide and directed at the top leadership of the CCP and its policies. Such political defiance is unprecedented in the post-Tiananmen era. Some protesters are now clamouring that they should step down, openly challenging the authority of Xi Jinping and the Communist Party. The report believes that Xi himself has bet his authority on the zero-clearing policy, and abandoning the zero-clearing policy now can be regarded as a “humiliating” retreat.

L'articolo Blank Paper Revolution: China Is Set to Undergo Major Changes proviene da InsideOver.

Unprecedented unrest has engulfed China over the country’s strict COVID-19 measures. Massive anti-blockade protests broke out simultaneously across China, especially in major cities such as Zhengzhou, Urumqi, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Xinjiang, and Chongqing. It is the largest nationwide mass protest in China since the 1989 crackdown, and it is likely to spread further and eventually change the entire situation. China is the only major country continuing to pursue a strict COVID-zero approach to the virus, and after nearly three years of restrictions, citizens are beginning to wonder when society will open up.

Video footage shows students at Beijing’s Tsinghua University openly opposing the COVID lockdowns where students were chanting “democracy, rule of law and Freedom of Expression”. The university is the alma mater of Chinese leader Xi Jinping who is alumni. More extraordinary scenes have captured the world’s attention. A video on Urumqi Road in Shanghai shows crowds chanting “Communist Party step down, Down with Xi Jinping” in unison. A deadly fire in Urumqi, the capital of China’s Xinjiang region, has unleashed the most defiant eruption of public anger against the ruling Communist Party in years. Anger over the deadly fire has built on long-simmering frustration over pandemic restrictions; Xinjiang has been under strict lockdown measures for over 100 days. In Shanghai, some residents even called for the party’s leader, Xi Jinping, to step down. The police across the road did not stop it.

Large-scale protests in China, especially in Xinjiang, are rare, given the extensive blanket of high-tech surveillance measures authorities have imposed on the region to quell what the government sees as separatist or extremist tendencies. “Unshakeable” authoritarian regimes are now being shaken at their very core. China has seen nearly 40,000 COVID cases in the last few days, a record in 11 months. Almost three years ago, China was the first country where the epidemic broke out; the epidemic situation in most countries was more severe than that in China, especially the United States, which was regarded as the country with the worst epidemic in the world. At that time, Communist China claimed that there were zero infections and patted its back as the most successful country in the world in epidemic prevention. Now China suddenly claims that the epidemic is severe and needs to be “dynamically cleared.” From best to worst overnight without even a transition period.

Chinese previous claims of “zero infection” must be a big lie, and now it claims that the epidemic is extremely serious, while the whole world has declared the end of the epidemic. Why have other countries returned to normal life long ago, but China is still in complete lockdown? Why are widespread protests enraging all across China?

After three years of epidemic blockade, most Chinese people are already stretched beyond their means and unable to make ends meet. Now there is no sign of the end of the ban, so it is better to fight than to wait for death. No matter how brutal the regime is, people will resist in desperate situations. It is time for China to change again today. The escape from Foxconn in Zhengzhou and protests against the blockade sparked a wave of resistance across the country. Everyone could not hold back anymore. Suddenly there was a glimmer of hope. It is the main reason people in many places took to the streets to hold large-scale anti-blockade protests in the past few days.

The government may find a way to stop the protests or placate the people demonstrating. However, the situation is highly unpredictable.

L'articolo China, Unrest Shakes Up Xi Jinping’s government proviene da InsideOver.

The rumours of an exit from the costly ‘Zero-Covid’ policy that had sent Chinese stocks soaring last week turned out to be unfounded.The government announced its unwavering commitment to stick with it despite mounting public frustration, fueling unrest and misery across the country.The announcement dealt a heavy blow to hopes for easing restrictions, driven by unverified social media rumours that China was forming a high-level committee to pivot away from zero-Covid. Share prices of Chinese companies listed in mainland China, Hong Kong and the US surged last week as investors eagerly seized on any speculation for a possible relaxation.

The Strategy of China

The pledge to stick with zero-Covid also became a major disappointment to the Chinese public. Many have grown increasingly weary of the incessant mass testing, centralisedquarantine, and stringent lockdowns, sometimes lasting for months. The zero-tolerance approach that aims to eliminate Covid cases as soon as they flare up is costing the lives they are intended to protect. The unrelenting campaign is enforced at a tremendous economic and social cost, as new fast-spreading variants make containing the virus near impossible.

Public frustration and resentment have grown in recent weeks after the conclusion of the Party Congress, which coronated its top leader Xi Jinping’s third term in power with a ringing endorsement of his zero-Covid policy.Experts warned that China could be hit by a new wave of infections and a new cycle of government-enforced lockdowns as winter approaches.

According to official data, China reported 5,496 local infections on Sunday, hitting a six-month high.More than one-third of those infections were reported in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou. The city of 19 million people is grappling with its worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic, with large swathes of its Haizhu district placed under lockdown.

The Situation in China

In the central province of Henan, migrant workers have abandoned a locked-down Foxconn factory enmasse, walking for miles to escape an outbreak at China’s largest iPhone assembling site. And, in the eastern financial hub of Shanghai, things are gloomy even at Disneyland. The park abruptly shut its gates last week to comply with Covid prevention measures, rapping visitors insidefor compulsory testing.

In the northwestern city of Xining, residents pleaded desperately for food as they suffered through the latest of the country’s stringent lockdowns.In the west, in Lhasa, the regional capital of Tibet, angry crowds have been protesting in the streets after more than 90 days of stay-home orders.In many other parts of the country, lockdowns, mandatory quarantines, daily mass testing edicts and travel restrictions continue to cripple businesses and everyday life, even as the rest of the world moves on from the pandemic.

Even in places not under extended lockdowns, the constant Covid testing edicts and stringent travel restrictions have fueled growing discontent.In Beijing, authorities have kept requirements tight for entering the Chinese capitalhome to most senior Chinese leaders. The restrictions were further tightened in the lead-up to the Communist Party Congress in October, and they haven’t been relaxed since.

The repeating cycle of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing is taking a heavy toll on the economy and society. Public patience is wearing thin, and frustrations are building.

L'articolo No End of Costly Zero-Covid Policy Fuels Unrest in China proviene da InsideOver.

This article appeared first on “The New York Times” as an op-ed. Inside Overs strongly thanks The New York Times and Professor Quamenn for giving the opportunity of publishing it.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a lesson in speed — the speed at which a novel virus among humans can spread, the speed at which it can rack up fatalities and cripple economies, the speed at which vaccines can be designed and produced, the speed at which misinformation can undermine public health. Amid all that rapidity is a different kind of speed, which drives the rest, like an engine spinning the cars on a nauseating carnival ride: the speed of viral evolution.

The coronavirus, like many other viruses of its ilk (RNA viruses with highly changeable genomes), evolves fast. It has adapted quickly to us. Now arises the crucial question of whether humans and human ingenuity can adapt faster.

Unless the answer is yes, we face a long, doleful future of continued suffering. Some experts reckon the toll of endemic Covid might be somewhere from 100,000 to 250,000 deaths every year, just in the United States. Millions of lives depend on whether human science, human governance and human wisdom can outpace the ingenuity of SARS-CoV-2, a relatively simple but enterprising agent consisting of four structural proteins plus an RNA genome.

Charles Darwin said the mechanisms of evolution never move quickly, but Darwin didn’t know about viruses. “That natural selection will always act with extreme slowness, I fully admit,” he wrote in “On the Origin of Species,” published in 1859. The first virus discovered, tobacco mosaic virus, didn’t come to scientific attention until decades later. As evolutionary theory developed from Darwin’s work and throughout much of the 20th century, it drew mostly on evidence from fields such as paleontology, biogeography, embryology and comparative anatomy — visible patterns that can reveal slow changes over long stretches of time. Those data are generally far less useful for measuring evolution when it happens fast.

But we have a new form of evidence for evolution: the sequencing and comparison of genomes. Whiz-bang machines do the sequencing — reading out the genetic code, letter by letter — and powerful computers help do the comparing, and it’s all much faster and cheaper.

Scientists can now track changes, mutation by mutation, in the DNA or the RNA that encodes each creature’s genetic instructions, watching and measuring as some of those mutations, the few that just happen to be useful, spread through a population. They can assemble a portrait in motion of even the fastest-evolving creatures, such as bacteria and viruses. When the bacteria or viruses happen to be pathogens that can infect humans, this discipline is called genomic epidemiology.

Among the pioneers of genomic epidemiology is Sharon Peacock, a professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Cambridge as well as the executive director of the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium. It’s a group of public health agencies and research institutions founded in April 2020 to sequence and analyze genomes of the new coronavirus. At this point, the contribution by labs in Britain accounts for almost 2.8 million of the globally reported SARS-CoV-2 sequences, about 23 percent of the world’s total.

Dr. Peacock and those who helped her establish and fund this effort recognized early that genomic information could be crucial to the pandemic response. But just gathering sequences and making them available to other scientists is not enough. That’s genomics without epidemiology — the application of population-level knowledge to public health.

“If you’re talking about speed,” Dr. Peacock told me recently, “the key thing is to think of the whole pipeline from start to finish.” What she meant by “pipeline” is a chain of physical steps (such as sampling a patient), laboratory processes (such as extracting viral genetic material and sequencing that virus’s genome) and analysis (interpreting the differences between one genome and another). They yield insights that can inform both clinical treatment of individuals and protection of the populace.

Hardware tools are important to such work. Software is also crucial. During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, a young graduate student named Áine O’Toole, along with other members of Andrew Rambaut’s lab at the University of Edinburgh, developed a tool called PANGOLIN (Phylogenetic Assignment of Named Global Outbreak Lineages). It became one of the go-to systems for placing new genomes on the SARS-CoV-2 family tree, assigning them rational if unmemorable labels (such as B.1.1.7), and contextualizing new variants of the virus when they emerged.

It was Dr. Rambaut, Dr. O’Toole and their lab colleagues who helped spot and track the first major variant, now called Alpha, when it appeared in southeastern England, moving toward London, in autumn of 2020. One year later, scientists in South Africa and Botswana, sequencing samples from travelers, detected another rising variant, named Omicron.

Such quick detection of variants is enormously valuable, but only if the data are transformed promptly into clear, actionable guidance. “We still have the important gaps in getting it into the clinic,” Dr. Peacock said. These gaps include making it easy for public health and medical personnel not trained in sequencing to use the data and the willingness of health care providers like hospitals to finance such work. “At the moment, the majority of sequencing beyond Covid-19 is funded by public health agencies and research funding,” she said.

That hasn’t changed since 2014, when Pardis Sabeti, a computational geneticist at Harvard University, led a team of genomic scientists responding to the horrific Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. They sequenced 99 genomes of the virus, sampled from patients at a hospital in Sierra Leone. Comparing sequences revealed that all those cases most likely resulted from human-to-human transmission, rather than from spillovers from a wildlife host.

The West Africa outbreak ended after more than 28,000 Ebola cases and 11,000 deaths, by which point genomic epidemiology had proved its value by revealing how the virus was spreading. With Covid-19, there have been 589 million known cases and more than six million deaths so far. The new discipline is scarcely able to keep up, let alone get ahead of the virus. Sarah Cobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago who works at the juncture of immunology, viral evolution and epidemiology, sees “gaping holes” in the genetic surveillance of Covid-19.

“Even though we do have lots and lots of sequences, they are disproportionally from a few locations,” Dr. Cobey told me. During the first year of the pandemic, Britain, New Zealand, Australia and Iceland were among the countries that sequenced a high share of cases. The Netherlands and the Democratic Republic of Congo were also notable for prompt sequencing. As the pandemic progressed, scientists in South Africa mounted an important sequencing effort (as reflected in the detection first of the Beta variant, then of the Omicron), and coverage improved also in Canada and Scandinavia. Other parts of the world remain “blind spots,” Dr. Cobey said.

The sad but not surprising fact is that high-income countries sequenced 16 times as many coronavirus genomes as a proportion of cases as low- and middle-income countries. Money is a limiting factor, but not just money. “I think the fundamental problem is really lack of scientific leadership to coordinate this kind of data gathering,” Dr. Cobey said. Few countries have had their Sharon Peacock or political leadership to heed and support the scientific leaders.

The world needs that leadership, broadening and paying for sequencing surveillance of this coronavirus and its changes, everywhere the virus goes. But we need much more, as Dr. Cobey and Dr. Peacock and other scientists warn.

We need ambitious seroprevalence studies (screening of blood samples for evidence of past infection) that will help scientists learn how many undetected infections have occurred. What’s the real case total in each country and around the world? We need farsighted and well-funded research on vaccine platforms that can be quickly adapted for use against whole classes of newly emerged pathogens, not just hurried efforts to create a booster for the latest variant. We need a universal coronavirus vaccine and a universal influenza vaccine, although neither — given the formidable capacity of those viruses to evolve — may be achievable.

More simply, we need temperature-stable and needle-free vaccines that can reduce the problems of vaccine refusal in high-income countries and vaccine unavailability in low-income countries that are hot. We need better antiviral drugs, even for rare but dangerous viruses (such as Nipah virus), entailing development efforts that may never be profitable for pharmaceutical companies.

Even more simply, as Dr. Cobey noted, we need investments toward much better ventilation and air filtration in our public buildings, reducing the spread of the coronavirus and other airborne pathogens. That’s not scientifically exciting, she conceded; it’s just important and cost-effective.

The evolutionary journey of this coronavirus has been grim and awesome. Arguably, the measured transformations of SARS-CoV-2 over the past 31 months, from the original strain to the subvariants of Omicron, provide one of the most precise pictures of swift evolution at a global scale in the wild — that is, not in beakers and flasks, not in laboratories, but in us. Evolution deniers, take note.

All of us should take note. We have 12 million snapshots of this thing in motion — which is enough, at the standard cinema projection rate of 24 frames per second, to make a movie of SARS-CoV-2 evolution 138 hours long. But because evolutionary biology is a descriptive science, not a predictive one, we still don’t know how the story might end. Probably it doesn’t end at all. And the genomic epidemiologists, as smart as they are, can’t save us from what’s still coming. We have to save ourselves.

L'articolo We Are Still in a Race Against the Coronavirus proviene da InsideOver.

We think of pandemics as something out of the ordinary, a dangerous disruption to everyday life; but the reality is that they are a recurrent, even normal, feature of human history, viewed across the millennia. The process of industrialisation during the nineteenth century brought repeated waves of cholera, typhus and typhoid, all of which spread easily in the crowded and insanitary conditions of rapidly expanding cities that were attracting a constant flow of immigrants, many of whom lived close to the poverty line. Even so, the impact of cholera was not entirely negative. It was soon realised that the solution to its spread lay in better sanitation; the consequence in London was the construction of massive sewers that still serve the city.

Pandemics within modern cities have many antecedents, and not simply within urban societies. Thus we would probably want to include within the category of pandemics the diseases, including smallpox and measles, that wiped out maybe nine-tenths of the native population in the areas of the Americas conquered by Spain and other colonial powers in the aftermath of Columbus’s discovery of the route across the Atlantic. Sometimes this is cast as a European crime against native peoples, and there is no doubt that the heavy physical demands Columbus placed on the native people of his major acquisition, Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) weakened still further what little resistance people had to the European diseases that arrived with the conquerors. But this, along with the devastating effects of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, was not an intended consequence of these invasions: the Spaniards wanted to make use of the manpower of the native population, but as that population died out they had recourse to the importation of black slaves, the beginning of the infamous Atlantic slave trade. One could therefore argue that the trade in black slaves across the Atlantic had its roots in the great American pandemics of the early sixteenth century. 

Europe had experienced its own devastating pandemic a century and a half earlier, with the arrival of bubonic plague in 1347. There is some evidence of small-scale outbreaks of bubonic plague, endemic among small rodents, along the famous Silk Roads that linked the area of modern Ukraine with the vast expanses of Eurasia, as fast east as China. The major Genoese trading centre in the Black Sea, Caffa in Crimea, was under siege by a Tatar army that used the bodies of plague victims as cannon fodder, catapulting them into the city and infecting its inhabitants; from there the disease spread on Genoese ships along the trade routes that led into the Mediterranean, arriving before long in Messina. Setting aside the multiple pandemics in the Americas, just mentioned, the Black Death is thought to have wiped out up to half of the population of Europe and the Mediterranean within about five years. In its pneumonic form it was most lethal – its mortality rate approached 100%. 

Recovery was severely hampered by its return again and again in the fourteenth century, and spasmodically thereafter. Its economic effects were drastic and we can talk literally of economic and social dislocation: large areas of the countryside were depopulated, and survivors often migrated to the towns where demand for workers was strong, significantly changing the balance between the rural and urban population. However, it is important to distinguish the short and long-term effects of the Black Death. Those who inherited wealth from deceased relatives often found themselves better off, with the result that demand for bettr food and for high and medium quality goods, such as cloths, expanded. A new and confident urban middle class emerged. Outside the cities, empty areas were given over to sheep and pastoral activity boomed in areas such as Spain and southern Italy. The Black Death effected an economic revolution. 

People learned to live with plague. Great cities such as Milan might lock themselves down. Quarantine was taken seriously. Plague increasingly became endemic, that is, confined to particular areas, with severe outbreaks in Milan in 1630 (memorably described by Manzoni), in London in 1665 and as late 1720 in Marseille. Europeans had no defence against this disease because it had been absent from the region for many centuries. Although the plague reported by the Greek historian and general Thucydides which took hold of Athens in 430-26 BC appears to have been typhoid rather than bubonic plague, the pandemic that hit the Byzantine Empire in AD 541-9 is now known to have been bubonic plague, and appears to have had similar effects to the Black Death: very heavy mortality, major economic consequences in the countryside as a result of population loss, and the shrinking of towns in parts of the eastern Mediterranean. 

In its pneumonic form this disease was spread by droplets in people’s breath, and many of the worst pandemics have been transmitted in this way, even when the bacillus or virus is totally different. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-20 is thought to have killed as many as 500,000,000 people worldwide, and its spread was facilitated by the movement of armies at the end of the First World War – it was not in fact Spanish, and Spain had kept out of the war. But wartime deprivation had probably weakened resistance in many of the countries it reached. Mutations in the influenza virus have been watched carefully, bearing in mind events such as the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968. 

But such diseases can also lose some of their potency, to judge, perhaps prematurely, from Covid-19. A lesson from the history of the Black Death is that a bacterium or virus that wants to survive cannot risk exceptionally heavy mortality for a long period. In such cases it kills not just people but ultimately itself as well, since the presence of many fewer people mean that it loses the opportunity to spread.

L'articolo Pandemics and the course of history proviene da InsideOver.

The corona pandemic did not pass over Israel, and like other countries of the world it was hit hard. 4,667,287 Israelis have been infected by the disease (out of a population of approximately 9.2 million) and the number of dead reached 11,710 (as of October 2022).

Along with health consequences, some of which are still unclear (after all, post-corona research is only in its beginnings), the pandemic also had far-reaching economic consequences, since during the first two years of the outbreak of the pandemic, the government in Israel adopted a strict policy of social distancing that included prolonged closures. This led to the paralysis of major sectors of the country’s economy and at the same time damaged the fabric of life, starting with the welfare system, education and higher education and ending with cultural life.

Israel was, however, in a good opening position compared to many other countries in the world, and this gave it an advantage in the fight against the disease. Its population and its government systems are practiced and have experience in dealing with emergency situations, although mostly security ones. In addition, the health system in Israel is considered an advanced system whose services are spread out and accessible to the entire population. All of this allowed Israel to become a pioneer in many aspects of dealing with the pandemic and, above all, performing mass tests to detect the disease, the ability to obtain a reliable and comprehensive picture of the state of morbidity and patients, and finally, a rapid mass vaccination operation of the entire population while monitoring of the results and effectiveness of the vaccinations. Israel was also a pioneer in formulating a policy of exiting the lockdowns in a way that allows the entire population to continue a normal life as much as possible. It is also worth adding that the fact that the population in Israel is relatively young eased the severity of the damage since the disease mainly affected older populations at risk.

However, Israel also had weak points, including the fact that political instability prevailed in it due to frequent election campaigns in those years, which often led to decisions that were based on political considerations rather than factual considerations. In addition, parts of Israeli society, such as the residents of the periphery, the ultra-Orthodox population and the Arab population tended to cooperate less than the general population with state institutions and follow its instructions, and their access to the health systems was also lower. This, alongside the fact that Israel controls the territories of the Palestinian Authority where millions of Palestinians live who are not its citizens but citizens of the Palestinian Authority, and therefore do not enjoy the same accessibility to health services.

After all this, it should be remembered that the disease was found to be deceptive, and thus for example the vaccines produced against it were found to be of limited validity since the body’s immunity weakens within a few months. In addition, new variants of the virus have been found to be resistant to the vaccine. Of course, all of this made it difficult to manage an orderly policy and to provide an intelligent long-term response to the pandemic.

But looking back, it can be stated that the Israeli system reacted quickly, functioned well within the limitations of the limited knowledge the world had about the pandemic, and gave a benevolent response to protect its population and this at the cost of only limited damage to the economy. And so, among the developing countries, Israel leads in all of the aforementioned growth rates recorded by the Israeli economy with the decline of the pandemic.

The outbreak of the Corona pandemic

At the end of December 2019, the corona virus that causes the disease COVID-19 began to spread in China, originating in the Wuhan province in the center of the country. In mid-February 2020, the virus began to spread rapidly throughout the world and soon, on 11 March 2020, it was defined by the World Health Organization as a global pandemic.

In Israel, the first patient was located on 27 February 2020, after he returned from a visit to Italy, and within a few days, the number of those infected by the virus began to climb to dozens and hundreds, and by the end of March 2020, there were already about 10,000 infected people. The first Israeli, an 88-year-old man, died of Corona on 20 March 2020.

Israel responded very quickly to the challenge, and certainly in comparison to many other countries, even though in the first stages of the outbreak of the pandemic, very little was known about it – how an how quickly does it spread? What are its dangers and how deadly is it, and finally, what is the right treatment for it. It should be noted that at this stage there was no vaccine for the pandemic or even a medicine that would relieve or even save the patients.

Israel and the corona – a good starting point 

Israel enjoyed a series of advantages that gave it a good starting point to deal with the dangers of the pandemic:

First, due to the political reality in the Middle East, Israel is actually a sort of isolated island cut off from its surroundings, with almost no entry or exit from the neighboring countries. This, in contrast to, for example, the European Union countries that cannot prevent transit between them and are limited in their ability to control entry or exit within their borders. This of course  facilitated the hermetic closing of the country to tourists, workers and immigrants who were perceived at the time as those who might bring new variants of the virus to Israel. It should be noted, however, that this was not a hermetically sealed and absolute closure of the borders, since Israel allowed holders of Israeli citizenship to return to it and in many cases, for example on humanitarian grounds, also to leave it and return to it later. This, of course, contributed to the spread of the virus and the arrival of new variants, Delta and Omicron, in the country.

Second, the governmental systems in Israel, with an emphasis on the health system, but more generally the population in the country, are used to a quick transition to an emergency situation, in view of the security challenges and even the military conflicts in which the country has repeatedly been subjected. For example, the IDF’s Home Front Command took responsibility for caring for vulnerable populations when lockdowns were imposed in the country and assisted the police in enforcing them. The army also took on the management of the effort to break the chains of infection by asking each infected man about the people with whom he came in contact. Military intelligence directed resources to collect information about the disease and to assist in the analysis of the data about its spread in Israel, and finally, the General Security Service was entrusted by a government decision to monitor isolated and infected people to make sure that they do not violate the isolation instructions they received.

Thirdly, Israel has an efficient public health system and according to many international rankings it is seen as one of the best in the world, in terms of its accessibility and the quality of service it provides to citizens. Next to an array of government hospitals in Israel there are several big health maintenance organizations with a spread of clinics all over the country. According to the law, every citizen must be registered in one of the health organizations. This reality makes it possible to receive reliable information in real time about the health status of all citizens and the spread of diseases and pandemics. This fact made it possible to quickly use the health system for the purpose of transmitting information to the population, in order to carry out tests on a mass scale to detect the virus or to control the state of the disease, and later also made it possible to have a vaccination operation that encompassed the entire population, and of course everyone who was interested in vaccination.

Fourth, Israel’s population is relatively young compared to the population in Western countries. In 2020, the rate of children up to the age of 14 in Israel was about 28%, and in contrast, the rate of people aged 65 and over was about 12% compared to double the rate in many European countries. Studies have revealed that the adult population in Israel is more active compared to other countries in the world, less isolated and cut off from family members, and therefore showed greater immunity to deal with the consequences of the pandemic.

Israel and the corona – the weak points

Alongside all this, it must be remembered that there were also shadows in Israel’s preparation for the fight against the pandemic.

Political instability – Israel fell into a prolonged political crisis at the end of 2018. In the reality of repeated election campaigns, Israel lacked a stable government and this had consequences for some of the decisions it made. Along with the many praises that Prime Minister,  Benjamin Netanyahu, received at the outbreak of the pandemic, for quickly diagnosing the danger and quickly mobilizing to fight it, it was argued against him that in many cases he worked to leverage the pandemic for the purpose of spreading fear among the population in order to mobilize support for him and that he avoided making decisions to impose policies of strict closure among the ultra-Orthodox population so as not to damage the support it gives him.

A health care system that has suffered continuous cuts over the years – in the transition that Israel has experienced in recent decades from a welfare state policy to a market economy has led to continuous damage to the public health and welfare systems. These affected the scope of the medical services and also their accessibility mainly in the peripheral areas. This undoubtedly created a burden on the health care system in the early stages of the pandemic, although there was no collapse and the hospitals were also able to cope with over a thousand seriously ill patients at the height of the disease.

And finally, Israeli society is characterized by heterogeneity based on class, religion and ethnicity. There is a clear gap between the center – the Tel Aviv area – and the periphery in accessibility to health, welfare and education systems. Alongside this, in Israel there are two communities whose integration into the social fabric is partial. One is the ultra-orthodox population, which makes up about 13% of the total population. This population is often of low social status and its birth rates are high, i.e. this is the population living in a particularly high density and this of course had an effect on the spread of the pandemic. In addition, it is characterized by obedience to the rabbis and suspicion towards the state institutions. And so, the enforcement of a policy of closures and social disconnection on the ultra-Orthodox education systems and on religious ceremonies – prayers in synagogues, weddings and funerals, etc. – turned out to be only partial. On the other hand, the religious leadership mobilized to encourage vaccination against the virus, and this was an important contribution to high vaccination rates among this population.

It is also worth noting the Arab population, which makes up about 20% of the total population in Israel. This population also belongs to a low socioeconomic status and in addition lives mostly in villages and towns in the periphery. Of this, the Bedouin population in the south of the country, which makes up about a quarter of the Arab population, partly lives in nomadic settlements that are not connected to electricity and water infrastructure and do not enjoy full access to health services. This population shows great suspicion towards the state institutions. The result is difficulty in maintaining and enforcing a policy of closures and social distancing as well as difficulty in convincing this population to get vaccinated.

Alongside these, we must of course mention the Palestinian population living in the territories of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and under the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. These are close to four million people and maybe more who are not citizens of Israel but are practically under its control as the occupying force in these areas. Israel did not see the Palestinian population as being under its responsibility but under the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas and therefore provided only indirect aid of testing and vaccination kits. It is worth noting that the Palestinian population comes into daily contact with the Israeli population – in the labor market, for example – and therefore the state of the disease among the Palestinian population had an inevitable impact on the state of the pandemic in Israel.

Israel is struggling with Corona

The corona pandemic was characterized by waves of infections that were characterized by the rapid spread of the disease to hundreds and thousands of infected people on a daily basis in the first waves and to over ten thousand infected people a day in the following waves. At the height of the disease in early 2022, when the Omicron virus became dominant, tens of thousands of people were infected every day, although most of them with mild symptoms.

As the familiarity with the disease became better, emphasis was placed on monitoring the number of seriously ill patients in need of treatment and even ventilation in the hospitals and not on the total number of patients, which as mentioned also included a young population, some of whom had no symptoms at all.

The initial response to the first wave – March – April 2020 – Israel responded quickly, and thus was among the first countries in the world, to response to the spread of the Corona disease. With the appearance of the disease in Israel, a policy of banning the entry and exit of non-citizens to Israel was announced, and later on the transfer of the educational systems to distance learning as well as work from home where this was possible. They also gave instructions to maintain social distancing and finally, within about a month, a total lockdown was announced in which the movement of citizens from their homes was restricted. Along with this, a policy of breaking the chains of infection was announced by questioning infected people about those they came in contact with, as well as a strict policy of isolation for infected people or those they came in contact with.

This policy indeed led to a dramatic decrease in morbidity rates and an exit from the lockdowns at the beginning of May 2020, but this was not done in a controlled manner and the result was renewed outbreaks of waves of infection (a second wave in May-July 2020, which culminated in a general closure of the entire country, and the third wave in December-January 2020).

It should be noted that Israel’s efforts to develop a vaccine for the virus on its own through the biological institute subordinate to the Israeli Defense Ministry did not go well as this required knowledge and ability that were beyond Israel’s ability. But an important Israeli contribution was an analysis of the available information found in the health systems in Israel about the trends and characteristics of the behavior of the virus that allowed Israeli scientists to make an important contribution in this field to scientific research in the world.

Vaccination of the population – With the development of vaccines for Corona by a series of pharmaceutical companies and receiving emergency approval for its distribution at the end of 2020, Israel quickly prepared to vaccinate the entire population starting in December 2020.

Quick action by the Israeli government while taking advantage of the country’s advantages and strengths – the fact that it is a relatively small population that has access to health services, made it possible to present a quick and reliable picture of the results of the vaccination. This fact made it possible to turn Israel into an attractive experimental laboratory for the companies developing the vaccines, and because of this Pfizer, for example, was willing to give Israel priority in the supply of vaccines, which made it possible to vaccinate the population with a full vaccine (two vaccines as required according to Pfizer’s medical specifications).

The rapid vaccination operation, within the framework of which about 60% of the country’s population were vaccinated within six months (and with the exception of their young people, no vaccination has yet been offered, this was even a much higher rate), made it possible to formulate a policy that allows the recovered and the vaccinated to fully return to their daily routine – on the basis of presenting a certificate of recovery from the disease or vaccination. And so, Israel also became a pioneer in returning to normality in the shadow of the disease for this population of those who are recovering and vaccinated. The data provided by Israel unequivocally proved the effectiveness of the vaccines, their contribution to improving the body’s ability to defend itself in case of illness, but also the decrease over time in the effectiveness of the vaccine.

As mentioned, the corona was proven to be a deceptive disease because it soon became clear that the vaccine weakened after a few months and apart from that, new alpha, delta and Omicron variants were discovered that the vaccines turned out to be less effective against and that thus even infected or vaccinated people were infected once again.

Indeed, in June 2021, although about half of the country’s population was already vaccinated, there was a renewed increase in cases of infection, most of which originated from Israelis who returned from other countries and were infected with the delta strain of the virus that became dominant in the world and in Israel. And so, the fourth wave of the corona pandemic began in Israel, yet it was a virus whose impact on patients was easier. In July 2021 Israel was the first country in the world to vaccinate its citizens with a third vaccine (booster vaccine).

“Living alongside the pandemic” – but this time the government decided on a policy change under the title of “living alongside the pandemic”. The leading principle of the strategy states that contagion must be suppressed with minimal damage to the economy. Thus, the examination of the severity of the pandemic will not be done according to the number of patients but according to the burden on the health systems and the number of seriously ill patients and even those on ventilators.

And yet, at the beginning of September 2021, Israel was the country with the highest number of verified people in the world in relation to the size of the population. But on the other hand, life continued as usual and economic life began to recover.

A fifth wave began at the end of 2021 – in the months of November – December with the appearance of the Omicron strain. Although the government imposed a ban on entry and exit to Israel and encouraged work from home in the private sector, it avoided imposing a lockdown. In addition, it decided in January 2022 to give a fourth vaccine to the entire population. The sixth wave – in June 2022, morbidity began to increase again, mainly due to the spread of the 5.BA variant, but this did not receive any attention, as it turned out that, as a rule, its damage is mild in those who are vaccinated. In September 2022, Israel began to vaccinate the population with a vaccine against the Omicron.

In all of the above regarding the vaccination of the population of Israel against Corona, as of October 2022, 6,718,301 received at least one dose, of which 1,643,280 received two doses, 3,661,649 received 3 vaccine doses, and 849,358 received 4 vaccine doses (out of a total population of 9.2 m.)

It is worth noting that many avoided receiving the vaccines both because the delta and omicron strains turned out to be easier and because Israel’s population is mostly young anyway and the vaccines for children under 16 were developed and put into use after the pandemic had already passed its peak and therefore the rate of vaccination among the young population was relatively low.

It should also be noted that the response of the population knew ups and downs, in the beginning mobilization was evident, but as time passed, fatigue was evident and also the feeling that the pandemic is not so terrible since it affects adults. This had the effect of decreasing vaccination rates. It should also be noted that the effect of the vaccine opponents was marginal.

Israel’s economy and the corona virus

The pandemic also had economic consequences, since in order to slow down the rate of its spread, a policy of social distancing and closures was decided which resulted in the paralysis of economic life. The government in Israel  initiated a wide range of aid programs for those affected by the economic damage of the corona virus.

At the peak of the corona virus, the level of unemployment that was on the eve of the outbreak of the crisis increased from 3-4% to about 10%, but in practice about a quarter of employees were forced to go on temporary leave or were affected by the scope of the job and salary. But the recovery was quick. The extent of unemployment decreased starting at the beginning of 2022 to about 3%, even less than its pre-covid rate of 2.2%, the GDP per capita decreased by 3.9%, recorded a rapid recovery compared to all the developed countries of the world and recorded an increase of 8% in 2021 and a rate of approximately 7% in 2022.

In conclusion, during the waves of the Corona pandemic, 11,710 Israelis died and about four and a half million were infected. It goes without saying that research into the long-term damage of the disease, post-Corona, is still in its infancy and it is therefore premature to assess the long-term consequences of this number of patients on society and the country.

However, this is a relatively low number of casualties compared to countries like the USA where over a million people died (out of a population of about 330 million) Italy where over 177 thousand people died out of a population of about sixty million or Germany where about 150 thousand people died out of a population of 83 million.

In general, it can be stated that society and the government systems in Israel were able to successfully deal with the pandemic and its consequences, to respond as quickly and effectively as possible, in view of the limits of knowledge about the disease, and to reduce as much as possible its effects.

The robustness of the state’s systems, their points of strength and their experience helped the Israeli leadership make effective decisions. The rapid economic recovery from the pandemic and the return to normality are proof of this

Israel – as a society and as a country – was therefore able to successfully meet the challenge of the corona virus.

L'articolo Israel and the fight against Covid-19: a model for the world? proviene da InsideOver.