What the End of ‘Zero Covid’ in China Means with Bill Bishop

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 December 2022

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The pandemic hasn’t raged within China the way it has in the rest of the world over the past few years. However, that’s beginning to change. Following a wave of protests, Chinese leadership officially rolled back some of the country’s most stringent Covid restrictions. The end of “zero Covid” policies, combined with an already strained medical system, along with low vaccination and immunity levels, could lead to disastrous public health and economic consequences. China could see over a million deaths in 2023, according to projections from the University of Washington Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation. Bill Bishop is a longtime expert on China, writer of his own Substack newsletter called “Sinocism,” co-founder of CBS Marketwatch and he worked in China for years. Bishop joins WITHpod to discuss how government control has been consolidated under president Xi Jinping, the timeline of events leading to this moment, why Covid case numbers in China are undercounted and what the latest developments portend for (what could be) a very sobering future.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I mean, there's going to be some really tragic outcomes.
0:02.2	And I mean, it is shocking how quickly this thing is spreading in China.
0:06.4	And there's no data.
0:07.4	They stop testing.
0:08.6	And they're lying about the deaths.
0:10.3	We're in a really deeply worrisome and volatile moment right now.
0:14.0	I think it's going to last for the next few weeks or a couple of months.
0:16.4	Hello and welcome to Wise is happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.
0:30.0	Well, this week you may have seen some headlines floating around along the
0:34.2	following lines 10% of the world's population estimated to contract COVID-19
0:40.2	in the next few weeks.
0:41.8	And that's a pretty arresting figure.
0:44.5	Again, like all kind of epidemiological modeling, it's a prediction about the future.
0:48.8	It's not a sure thing, but it's relates to the fact that China right now is going through
0:56.0	an unprecedented engagement with the pandemic, something that hasn't happened there
1:03.2	since 2019 when this new coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan.
1:08.7	The pandemic has not raged within China the way it has the rest of the world
1:13.1	for the duration of three years.
1:14.8	And that has been largely due to extremely aggressive measures
1:20.0	that the Chinese government has implemented to contain viral transmission,
1:25.1	to never let viral transmission pick up enough such that they had to abandon the measures you
1:33.5	use when something first enters a populace, right?
	...

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